Inspired by the dream of “One straw revolution” of Masanobu Fukuoka, G. Narendranath left his bank job to be a farmer in his native village in Venkatramapuram, Chittoor District, Andhra Pradesh.  Over the decades he along with his wife Uma Shankari have worked on Dalit issues and land struggles and led many padayatras working with others including Andhra Pradesh Vyavasaya Vrutthidharula Union (APVVU).  He was active in Human Rights Forum,  National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), on issues of civil rights, displacement issues and organizing public hearings on two big SEZs in AP.  Naren & Uma initiated Rashtriya Raithu Seva Samiti and Bhu Samskranala Karyacharana Udyamam (Forum for Land Reforms) to raise voice on various problems of the farming sector.

Remembering Naren, who passed away on 5 July 2009, we share the article he wrote "Dilemmas in Agriculture."  | Download pdf

Dilemmas in Agriculture
A Personal note
Gorrepati Narendranath

"A human environment cannot exist apart from nature, and so agriculture must be made the foundation for living.  The return of all people to the country to farm and create villages of true men is the road to the creation of ideal towns, ideal societies and ideal states.”  (Masanobu Fukuoka – in – The Natural Way of Farming).

What inspired me to go back to my ancestral village in the eighties was the dream of “One straw revolution” of Masanobu Fukuoka, the need for alternatives to the present paradigms of modern science, development and polity raised by Rajni Kothari, Dhirubhai, Ashish Nandy, Vijay Pratap and other sensitive and eloquent social scientists of Lokayan, the urge to do something – crystallizing the ideas (into action) by Uma Shankari, my wife, and my father who was a government servant all his life, but a farmer at heart. He  increasingly took the driver's seat once we moved to the village.

A cocktail of social work, farming and research has not taken me very far in finding solutions to the problems (or challenges) in the agriculture sector.  But it has certainly made me more aware of the complexity of the variables involved, their interconnections and contradictions.  Before finding ‘solutions’, to recognize situations for what they are.  I now feel more at sea than when I began – fourteen years ago( in1987) – having gone back to my ancestral village and ancestral property of 36 acres in Venkatramapuram of Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, 65 kms. from the religious centre of modern Hindu India – Tirupati.

Some of these dilemmas are:

    * Is natural/organic farming a viable proposition?
      How does one meet the cash needs through organic farming?   
      How to make it less laborious? And yield more?
      Or should we simply say “agriculture into economics won’t go?”  

• Accepting the unsustainable nature of modern farming  based on  chemicals and pesticides, how does one cope with the short term need to feed starving millions?  But for the high yielding varieties of the green revolution, would it have been possible for our country to become reasonably self-sufficient in food and get out of the clutches of the food-politics of U.S.A.?

• Haven’t all societies in the past, feudal, capitalist or socialist based themselves on extraction of surplus value from agriculture and utilizing the same for development in other spheres especially industrial? How then are we thinking of a society in which agricultural surplus is minimal and terms of trade are in favor of agriculture and the countryside?

• Can we stop the genetically modified foods/seeds from swamping the market?  Especially if they are going to be cheap and plentiful. at least to start with?

• Are we underestimating or ignoring human tendency to try and do with less effort to relax from any activity regarded as ‘work’?  To consume ‘new’ things?  Of wanting to bite the forbidden fruit?  To innovate, to rebel?

• If foreign agricultural products (or any product for that matter) are going to be cheaper, what harm is there in allowing their imports?  Will it not be good for the consumer and will it not propel the producer in our country to look for ways to make his produce cheaper?  To improve yields and efficiency?

• Isn’t producing for personal gain a more efficient and rational way of organizing production and sale than co-operative/collectivized effort?  Aren’t these the lessons from our own experience and that of USSR and China?

• How far is it practical to combine the efforts of agricultural workers and farmers on their demands?

• Is it possible to organize farmers on a national-international level?

• Are land reforms a thing of the past?  How far can parcelling of land go?

    * How far are caste and untouchability impediments to agrarian mobilization?

In the following narrative I shall try to address some of these dilemmas and the challenges we have faced and continue to face in the course of the last fourteen years of our stay in our village here, recognizable by our weakening eyes, graying hair, and growing children. We have been trying our hand at organic farming and chemical-pesticide based farming, trying to make our farming viable and not really succeeding; trying to organize the farmers on issues like increased power charges (7 times at one stroke), the WTO imports; assisting agricultural workers, especially dalits on the question of untouchability, land reforms, and access to tamarind trees; helping the bamboo workers to form a co-operative society; trying to kick up enthusiasm for local health traditions and ayurveda; we only seem to be running in circles, if at all…….

It is therefore necessary to do some introspection and reflection on what changes have occurred and are taking place, why are we doing what we are doing and why is there no adequate response or why are people responding the way they are.  I have broadly divided the narrative in to three sections:  The first part deals with our battles (long live Don Quixote) in organic and inorganic farming.  The second part deals with the problems of the agricultural workers and dalits.  In the third part an attempt is made to reflect on the issues at a more general level.