Författare: Lydia Källberg Normark

Kudumbam NGO is helping marginalized and small scale farmers in Southern India to cultivate organic and organize themselves to get stronger together. Currently Kudumbam and the farmers are working with a certification for organic products called PGS; Participatory Guarantee System. PGS is different from other organic certifications in the sense that the farmers work together in a self-regulatory system, where they form groups and inspect the organic cultivation of each other. Thus, they can guarantee that their agricultural products have been produced without any chemical pesticides or inorganic fertilizers.

Most traditional organic certifications involve a third-part consultant that from time to time inspect the farms, to guarantee that the agriculture is organic. The negative side of this, is that it is often very costly for the farmers to certify their products, since they have to pay for the consultancy. Hence, the organic farmers working with Kudumbam are now in the process of shifting from a third-part certification to the PGS certification. This way they can save money together, and sell their organically certified products. Kudumbam started working with PGS in 2015, and over 100 farmers are already certified.

Next step in the empowerment of the organic farmers is the creation of a Producer Company. The newly PGS certified farmers are in the process of starting their own company for marketing of their products like millets, pulses, traditional rice varieties, vegetables and fruits. At the moment a problem for many small scale farmers is that they get a low income since there are many middle-hands involved in the business. Typically a so-called middle man will buy the product directly from the farmers, and then sell it to a whole seller, that in his turn will sell the product to the retailers, i.e. shops where the consumers can buy the products at a much higher price than the farmer got. Kudumbam is therefore working to link the producers more directly to the consumers, and facilitating training for the PGS-farmers on how to register their own company is one part of this work.

 

Aravindan Neelamegam is an organic farmer in the Pudukkottai district, Tamil Nadu. He cultivates suger cane, and not only is this done pesticide-free and with organic fertilizers, but his farm is also drip irrigated with renewable energy from solar panels! By this means Aravindan shows the way of innovative sustainable agriculture for the 21^st century.

The area where Aravindan lives is a drought prone district, and the tendency during the last decades is less rainfall every year. This year brought a late and heavy monsoon with severe floods in the coastal areas of Tamil Nadu, resulting in destruction and many deaths especially in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. But around Pudukkottai, some 350 km south of Chennai, the farmers are still wishing for more rain. They are not only facing to little rain fall, but also depletion of the ground water level.

Aravindan has therefore opted for drip irrigation in his farm, which is less water consuming than conventional irrigation. Around the 15 acres (6,7 Ha) of sugar cane plantation, there are tubes with small holes buried in the soil, which are connected to an open well. The well has a pump set that is driven by an electric motor which receives energy from solar panels. The total potential from the solar panels is 12 kW, and Aravindan installed them two years ago.

Aravindan tells that he started to cultivate organic 10 years ago, after he had faced several years of bad yields, even though he was applying more fertilizers every year. He then came in contact with Kudumbam, an NGO that is working with organic agriculture in Tamil Nadu. He asked for advice and the trainers of Kudumbam explained to him that the heavy application of inorganic fertilizers was actually making his soil losing its organic matter and fertility. He was willing to try anything, and started to make compost and cultivate green manures (nitrogen fixing plants). And his efforts gave good result, only one year after going organic his yields were increasing, as the soil health at his farm improved. Aravindan is now a pioneer of organic farming in his village.

Kudumbam NGO has three principal working areas in Tamil Nadu (India). The main office is in Trichy, and the organization also runs an ecological farm called Kolunji south of the city in the Pudukottai District, and has a regional office by the coast in the Nagapattinam District.

Some time ago I had the pleasure to visit the coast office together with Mr Oswald and Mr Ramadass from Kudumbam. It was a three-hour drive to get there from Trichy, and on the way Oswald told me that Kudumbam started to work on the coast in 2005 after the tsunami. Many farmers had gotten their land destroyed by the salt and the mud coming from the seawater of the tsunami, and Kudumbam started working together with communities for the recovery of farmlands. This work is now completed, but Kudumbam has continued working in the area, now with the main focus on empowerment of rural women.

We went to Kudumbam´s office on the coast for a meeting with representatives of farmers (mainly women) that have organized themselves into federations, in order to receive loans from a national bank called NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development). With the help from Kudumbam´s field staff in the area, women in many villages have started “Neighbourhood Support Teams” (NST), each with 5-7 members. Several NSTs then go together and form federations; so far 112 NSTs have been formed into 4 federations in the area. Individual members can then apply for small loans, where the rest of the members in the team stand as a guarantee. Therefore it is important that the teams consist of neighbours that know and trust each other. Last year the federations received loans from NABARD for the first time, and a total of 250 people were granted small loans.

The meeting started with the beautifully dressed women sharing their own stories, which Oswald translated from Tamil to me. Several of them had borrowed money to buy goats, which had given kids, and so they had earned money. Others had borrowed to pay for the education of their children, or to start small shops in their villages. So far the repayment of the loans have been 100 percent. At the end of the day there came four representatives from the bank (four men), and the leaders of the federations gave short presentations of their budgets and the new loans they want to apply for. The bank men seemed quite impressed by the organization of these rural women, and they encouraged them to send in their new loan applications as soon as possible. Even though the meeting was going on in Tamil and I couldn’t understand much, I was impressed by the women and their eager to improve their economic situation.

But no story can be completely happy. On the following day during a staff meeting at the office, a young woman showed up with her husband. She had taken a small loan last year, which she had already paid back, and she also had some savings in the NST’s account. Now her husband immediately wanted her savings, and the staff explained that this is not possible without the approval of the federation. The discussion was going on fast and I could understand that the man was being rude, at the end he left and his young wife started to cry. I asked Oswald and he explained to me that the man had earlier beaten his wife, and the members of her NST didn’t like that, hence he now wanted her to leave the group. When he had left the woman said that if she couldn’t get her savings back he would beat her again. Because of this the staff made an exception and gave her a cheque for the money. I was feeling both angry and sad and asked Oswald if the woman could not contact the police when her husband was beating her, Oswald then smiled and said “the policemen would just tell her to be more patient with her husband”. This is the reality faced by many women in Tamil Nadu, especially in the rural areas.

Kudumbam means family in Tamil, and it is the name of the Trichy-based organisation in Tamil Nadu (South India) where I will spend the next five months for an internship. The atmosphere within the organisation is very friendly and I have been feeling like home since the start!

Kudumbam is an NGO working for sustainable rural development through organic agriculture and empowerment of women and children. This is done in several ways; on a grass root level by trainings for small and marginalized farmers, by running a home for children, and by taking part of local and international networks for advocacy and lobbying. I am here through the Swedish network Future Earth of which Kudumbam is a member.

On my very first day in Trichy there was a lot of action! Kudumbam was organizing an activity together with one of the mayor universities in the city to celebrate the International Women Farmers Day and the World Food Day. The event was hold at the Department of Women Studies at the Bharathidasan University, and Kudumbam had brought female farmers from the villages where they are working, who spoke about their experiences of changing into organic farming. Mr Oswald Quintal and Mrs Poppy John, both from Kudumbam, also spoke about the situation women farmers are facing today in Southern India, and about the importance of choosing climate resilient crops, which often means traditional seed varieties that are drought and flood tolerant. Kudumbam also launched its new edition of a Millet Recipe Book, which is part of their program to promote the consumption of different types of millet. All speeches where held in Tamil, but luckily there was a lady in the audience who where able to translate it into English for me. At the end of the day Kudumbam had organized a food stall where they sold tasty millet dishes, and there was a big crowd of students and other visitors buying the food and recipe books. There also came some journalists from local newspapers and a TV-station, and to my surprise I was in the Tamil newspaper the next morning!

Oswald Quintal, director of Kudumbam, later told me that the organization has been working with small and marginalized farmers in Tamil Nadu since 1982. They started working mainly with male farmers, but over the years they have noticed that female farmers have been responding better to the trainings in organic farming, being more willing to incorporate water conservation strategies, and to cultivate drought tolerant crops like millet instead of rice, and phasing out chemical pesticides. Kudumbam has also conducted studies showing that women make 80% of the agricultural work, but in spite of this they are not considered as farmers and often lack the land rights. Therefore the organization is now mainly focusing on small-scale female farmers, and I am looking forward to learn more about the work!