At a time of severe climatic event and the worst forest fires in Russia’s history, it is unfathomable that the government may allow Real Estate Developers to do what the Nazis couldn’t — bulldoze the Pavlovsk Experimental Station that holds thousands of varieties of apples, strawberries, cherries, raspberries, currants and other crops, 90 percent of which are not found anywhere else in the world. During the siege of Leningrad in WWII, the scientists at the station starved to death rather than eat the valuable seeds contained in the collection.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust has organized a petition which can be signed here.

The way forward to sustainable agriculture lies in sticking to traditional methods, writes Baba Mayaram

Daily Pioneer, May 12, 2010

At a recent agricultural festival in Indore, Uttarakhand was represented by a stall displaying traditional seeds. Fascinated by their texture, colours and sizes, I was tempted to pick them up. The stall stocked small plastic bags containing seeds of dhan, rajma, mundwa (kodo), marsa (ram dana), jhangora, wheat, lobia and bhatt. I later learnt that the credit for this display and the “seed movement” that has ensured that these seeds remain in circulation amidst an environment of aggressive biotech altered varieties goes to conservationist Vijay Jaddhari. He comes from the land of the Chipko Movement which practised the Gandhian methods of satyagraha and non-violent resistance, through the act of hugging trees to protect them from being felled.

Mr Jaddhari has actively been protecting the biodiversity of the region through the “seeds movement”. He started to revive traditional agricultural practices once he sensed the damage chemical fertilisers and new technologies could wreak on farming practices. This was the motivation behind the movement and at the core of this lay urgency to protect local varieties of seeds. [more]

The film ‘Apna Aloo Bazaar Becha’ (Sold One’s Potatoes in the Market), based on traditional agro-biodiversity and on the work and people of Beej Bachao Andolan won the Golden Deer award for the best short film at the ECOFILMS festival held in Rodos, Greece in June 2008. The film, made by Pankaj H Gupta is slated to be screened at a number of other festivals and venues in the coming months.

In his acceptance speech, read in absentia, at the award ceremony, he said, ” Few mountain communities, however remote, remain untouched by globalization. Jarhdhargaon, a typical village of middle Himalaya in the Indian province of Garhwal (Uttarakhand), led an isolated, egalitarian existence until just 30 years ago, living off an agro-pastoral system that had sustained human life and the environment for over six centuries. Today, it is in the middle of a rapid social and environmental transformation. This short documentary, based entirely on local perspectives, reflects on this process of change – what triggers the shift to modernization and what impacts it has on the personal, social and environmental spaces. In particular, the film focuses on the primary subsistence activity of farming: whether it can survive in the face of steady out-migration, and if the attempts by Beej Bachao Andolan (Save Seeds Movement) to resist modernization can be successful.”

Pankaj Gupta is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment & Development in Bangalore (India). On the filming, he says, “The film has a simple message – that our relations with nature, and with each other, are of vital importance. It is encouraging to know that the dilemmas of a remote mountain community in India has found resonance in far-off Europe…. In a sense, the award is really a tribute to the values that the film represents and to all the people in front of the camera for baring their souls.”

Project Censored Releases Censored 2008 and its pick of the 25 most important under-covered news stories of 2006-07.

Project Censored announces its selection of the Top Censored News Stories of the 2006-2007 cycle. Each year since 1976, hundreds of student researchers, faculty, and volunteer members come together to select the most important news stories that were under-covered, glossed over or ignored by the country’s major media outlets.

One of these concerns the far-reaching but little reported Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (with a telling acronym of KIA) that will hand Indian agriculture to US agribusiness and open India’s doors to rapacious corporations such as Wal Mart. A brief summary and link follows:

Farmers’ cooperatives in India are defending the nation’s food security and the future of Indian farmers against the neoliberal invasion of genetically modified (GM) seed. As many as 28,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide over the last decade as a result of debt incurred from failed GM crops and competition with subsidized US crops, yet when India’s Prime Minister Singh met with President Bush in March 2006 to finalize nuclear agreements, they also signed the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), backed by Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Wal-Mart. The KIA allows for the grab of India’s seed sector by Monsanto, of its trade sector by giant agribusiness ADM and Cargill, and its retail sector by Wal-Mart.

Though the contours of KIA have been kept so secret that neither senior Indian politicians nor the scientific community know its details, it is clear that Prime Minister Singh has agreed to sacrifice India’s agriculture sector to pay for US concessions in the nuclear field. [more]

Zee News, 30 December, 2006

Dehra Dun, Dec 30: Alarm bells have started ringing in the Garhwal himalayas of Uttaranchal amid reports that traditional crops are on the verge of extinction.

This has caused fresh concern among agronomists who are calling for preservation of traditional crops which were developed keeping in view prevalent environmental conditions in the region.

A new survey conducted by the state government has also confirmed that the area supporting a variety of traditional crops declined by a whopping 72-92 per cent during the past two decades. Traditional crops have mostly been replaced by high yielding cash crops like potato, soybean, mustard and amaranth.

They study was conducted in 150 villages of the Garhwal region that once boasted of locally grown pulses.

The study also indicated that the decline was a fallout of the on-going trend of vanishing traditional crops in India and the neighboring states like Nepal. Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bhutan.

In the Himalayan Gazetteer of 1882, historians have listed 48 varieties of rice saying there are scores of others which cannot be described.

Today, only seven or eight of these varieties are cultivated with only ramjawan, thapachini, lalmati and rikhva in irrigated land and ghiyasu in rainfed areas, the survey said.

Bureau Report