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We are what we eat,
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but how many of us know
what we are actually eating?
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How many of us know
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what food does to the environment
before it comes to our plate.
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How many of you know
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what food does to the farmer
who is producing that food?
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Do you know? Have you ever thought?
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How many of you think,
when you are eating food,
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about the farmer who has produced it
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or the fate of the farmer
who has produced it?
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These are some of the questions
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which grappled me
when I was studying agriculture.
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While doing my PhD in agriculture,
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I had a choice.
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Like every young boy in the 90s,
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I was also crazy about getting
into Indian Civil Service.
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I was reading about the Indian economy.
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I really understood
about the Indian economy
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by reading for an exam.
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Finally, by the time
I got into the services,
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I was selected for Indian Revenue Service.
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But I also had a choice of joining
as an Agricultural Research Scientist.
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It was a tough choice.
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I made my choice to join
as an Agricultural Research Scientist.
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I thought, I should continue
working with farmers.
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(Applause)
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But that didn't last long,
I'll come to that.
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Before I come to that,
let's understand: what is our food?
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What are we eating? How safe is our food?
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All of you saw this news, some time back.
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Pesticides residues
in soft drinks and bottled water.
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But forgotten the next day.
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Have you ever thought
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how pesticides residues got
into this bottled water or soft drinks?
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If bottled water and soft drinks
had pesticide residues,
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the water you used to make tea or coffee
also must be having.
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But we never worry about it.
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The news is short,
the next day we forget about it.
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At least this must be in your memory:
noodles having heavy metals.
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How many of you thought,
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how did these heavy metals
reach the noodles?
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If lead has to be added to the noodles,
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probably lead is more costly
than the noodles.
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Nobody will add it, but it came.
How did it come?
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If ingredients used
to make noodles had the lead,
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then the 'aata' which you used
to make your 'chapati'
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also must be having.
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Or the 'samosa' which you're eating
also must be having, right?
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But we don't connect the dots.
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Same story when we hear
about pesticide residues in vegetables.
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You all get horrified,
but forget it in the evening.
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We all think, if we buy food
at a good place,
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or eat it in a good hotel, it's safe.
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Food is only as safe as it is grown.
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End of pipe solutions don't work.
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The pesticides which are
used in agriculture,
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less than 1% actually kills the insects,
99% gets into the water,
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gets into the air,
and comes back into your food.
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We look at it very casually.
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Everything happening around us,
we look at it very casually.
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I'll give you an example.
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While having the lunch,
I saw people painting there.
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What is that? Spray paint.
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Where does it go?
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Part of it goes onto the board,
part of it into the air.
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You were all eating there.
It comes there.
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We are all educated,
we feel we can make connections.
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We never make them.
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We expect that the farmer
will make those connections
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and produce safe food for all of us.
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I think that's there is a disconnect
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between what we observe,
what we know, and how we act.
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It is a serious problem.
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It's not only about the pesticides.
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Do you know the eggs
that you buy in the market,
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what kind of eggs are you buying?
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They are haploid eggs.
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Haploid means they are produced
without male and female meeting together.
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That's why if you hatch the eggs,
they won't make chickens.
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But how they are produced?
They are produced by using estrogens.
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And what happens to those estrogens?
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When you eat those eggs
they'll come back to you.
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That's one reason today
the puberty in girls has advanced.
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The gynecological problems
in women have increased.
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The breast development
in men has increased.
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Last year's India Today's survey shows
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that the largest number
of plastic surgeries done in India
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are to remove breasts in men.
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You got into the situation where fruit,
which is supposed to be healthy,
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is creating all these problems.
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It's not just the pesticides,
or antibiotics, or growth hormones
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which are used in production,
but also how they are processed.
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You might have heard, last week,
10 days, doing rounds in all the media:
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artificially ripened fruits.
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But why are fruits ripened artificially?
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If all of you want
to eat fruits off-season:
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how do they do it?
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If you want mangoes in May,
how do you get mangoes?
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You have to cut unripened ones,
ripen it artificially, and sell it.
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Bananas which look uniformed yellow.
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What are they?
They are all carbon ripened.
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The apples, the shiny apples
which you see.
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What are they?
When were they produced?
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Where were they produced?
Do you know?
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California apples,
you get apples from California.
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Can you keep it fresh?
They are coated with wax.
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Go back to your home,
take an apple from your fridge.
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Just scratch it. You'll see the wax.
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We are eating all that.
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The watermelons which are red in color,
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they are injected with injections, color.
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They are injected with growth hormones.
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The milk which is sold,
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we have seen in news
of the last several years,
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the reports say,
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"The milk is contaminated
with synthetic milk."
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If you want to have milk
at 40 rupees a liter,
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that's what you get.
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We want food cheaper,
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and there is competition
between the companies.
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They pay low prices to the farmers.
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They also contaminate it
and then get away with that.
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All brands of milk sold in Hyderabad,
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is prone to have been
contaminated with synthetic milk.
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GM foods.
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How many of you know about this?
How many of you have heard about this?
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Bt Brinjal.
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I'll tell you simply what Bt Brinjal is.
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When pesticide is sprayed from outside,
it damages the environment.
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Like I said, 99% goes into the environment
only 1% kills the insect.
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So, scientists thought, "Why not
producing pesticide in the plant itself?"
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So the plant produces insecticides,
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so that whichever insect
eats the plant will die.
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But what happens to us?
Who eats that?
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So, there are several bio safety questions
in front of us which were never addressed.
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What you see here, yellow, white,
golden rice, which is going to come soon.
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Do you know why it was done?
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They say, vitamin A deficiency
is a serious problem,
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so we will produce vitamin A in the plant.
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If you eat that rice, you can have
as much as vitamin A as possible,
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but do you know vitamin A
is a fat soluble vitamin?
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It's not just enough to have vitamin A,
but you also need to have enough fat,
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but if you have enough fat in your food
you don't need golden rice.
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In 2005, we came across
a farmer in Guntur,
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who was cultivating Bt Bhendi.
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We were shocked.
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I said, "How did you get it?"
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He said, "The company gave me the seeds."
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We went to the company,
and they said, "We are doing a trial."
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We went to the government.
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The government said,
"Yeah, that's their seed."
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They said, "You are not permitted."
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It was taken off in 2005.
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2013, similarly we came across cotton,
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herbicide-tolerant cotton which is grown.
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No permissions.
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In 2009, when Bt brinjal was permitted,
there was a public discussion.
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It was the only time
there was a public discussion,
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to introduce whether we need
a food or not, and it was banned.
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Sometimes, some wise politicians
take better decisions.
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But otherwise we would have
been flooded with GM foods.
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Today there is case
pending in the supreme court,
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there is an expert committee
appointed by the supreme court
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which said, "We don't need this
for next the 10 years. Let's wait."
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There's a parliamentary standing committee
which also said, "We don't need it."
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But you don't know how they are
going to come into your plate.
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Food is not only useful energy,
but also good for your health.
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It can treat many of the diseases.
Food is a medicine.
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It can act as preventive medicine,
and can also act as a curative medicine.
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I know many people who are working on
treating autism with good food.
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Many problems which you are seeing
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- obesity, diabetes, blood pressure -
all are because of the food which you eat.
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You need to make a right choice
about your food.
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Second: what food does to the environment.
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Let's look at the ecological footprints.
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How many of you have seen rice fields?
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Almost all, right?
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What comes to your mind
when we think of rice fields?
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Full of water.
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How much water does it take
to produce an acre of rice?
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6 million liters.
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6 million liters per acre of rice.
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Which is equal to 100 families
annual consumption.
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One family of five members
eats about a kilogram of rice a day.
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Which is equivalent to
a tanker of water: 180 showers.
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All of us want to eat rice.
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You need more and more water
for the production of rice.
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Let's make a making calculation:
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how much one meal of rice in Hyderabad
costs to the environment?
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It's probably as big as a whole dam.
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We need to worry
about the ecological footprints.
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It's not just about the water,
about pesticides, about growth hormone.
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Everything.
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What agriculture leaves
before it comes to your plate?
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And not just that.
What does it do to the farmers?
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The more and more pesticides
you spray, insects get resistant.
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They don't work.
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First time you spray,
second time you spray,
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third time you spray,
fourth time you drink it.
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That's what we have seen
all along, farmer suicides.
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The fall out of such things
is increasing cost of cultivation,
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but the prices are not increasing.
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Production costs for one kilogram of rice,
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2,100 rupees
as per government calculations,
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but today the price is
on 1,400 rupees for farmers.
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Today a ton of sugarcane is 2,000 rupees.
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A ton of firewood is 4,000 rupees.
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How can farmers live?
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The policies are also lopsided.
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Today, the average income
of 83% of the farmers in this country
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is only 5,000 rupees.
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So farmers have lost
their economic independence.
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Not just economic independence,
but physical independence as well.
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These are photographs which we have taken
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of farmers standing
in queue for fertilizers.
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Standing in queue for seeds.
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Seeds which they can produce.
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Fertilizer which they can make
by composting,
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but they are not subsidized.
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If you buy it in a market,
they are subsidized.
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Lopsided policies from government.
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All these lead to farmer suicides.
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In last 20 years, 300,000 farmers
have committed suicide.
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Every day about 48.
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What is the point about just discussing
the dark side of the picture?
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How much and what can we do
to change the situation.
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Some of us working in agriculture
at various institutions came together,
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and we started an organization
called Center for Sustainable Agriculture,
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in 2004.
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We started working with farmers,
telling them how they can move away
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from the high external input
base agriculture
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to low external input based agriculture.
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It was not easy,
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but what we found is across the country
there were wonderful experiences.
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But all those experiences
were taught in ideological frameworks.
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They don't talk to each other.
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There are good things and bad things,
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if they would discuss with each other
it would have been good,
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but they never talk to each other.
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Mainstream institutions
never worried about them.
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So we brought all the practices together,
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evolved what we called
sustainable agricultural practices.
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The first success came in Kulukulla.
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Kulukulla is village in Kamang district
which became completely pesticide free.
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The village, which was spending
about 6 million per annum,
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they completely stopped using pesticides.
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(Applause)
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The Agriculture minister came
and said, "Wonderful. What do you want?"
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The farmers said, "Make
Andhra Pradesh pesticide free."
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He was amazed. He said,
"Certainly I'll do. But what do you want?"
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I said, "We are happy with what we have.
Just change all agricultural practices."
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He brought all the scientists
of the department of agriculture together
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to see and then make a change.
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They said, "Sir, this is one village.
We can't do it. It is not possible."
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Then came Enabavi.
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This is about 80 kilometers from here,
completely organic village.
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The last three years,
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more than 10,000 people
have visited the village
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to know how they are doing farming.
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But this also has not changed
anything under government.
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But consumers have changed.
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Many people have started
understanding what is good for them.
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This is an advertisement
which is The Hindu uses for itself.
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This is a village called Dorli.
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Dorli is in Vardha.
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After Telangana, you hear
lots of suicides from Vardha.
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In 2005, the village was put up for sale,
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farmers decided we can't do farming.
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They put up village for sale.
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We went there in 2006 and said,
"Can we start working together?"
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Today all of them have repaid their loans,
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all of them are back to farming.
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(Applause)
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It's possible. It's possible.
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All examples are in front of us.
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We also started working
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with the woman self-help groups
in Andhra Pradesh.
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These are cover stories
of "Down To Earth" magazine,
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which tracked the whole change.
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We started with 225 acres in 2005.
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Today its 3.5 million acres
in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana together,
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pesticide free.
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(Applause)
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50% of use of pesticide
in the state has come down.
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We were third in the country
in terms of per acre pesticide used,
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today we are 20th in the country.
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(Applause)
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This was part of a show
on Satyamev Jayate,
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some of you may have seen it.
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In this show we had
an interesting discussion.
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The other side was the largest
pesticide seller in this country.
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Towards the end Amir Khan asked me
a question, "I am fully convinced
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with what you're saying
and what you're doing.
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It is possible to do it India.
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But how do I convince
this man who is sitting here?"
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I said, "Ask his brother,
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His brother is the largest
organic exporter in this country."
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(Applause)
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And he said, "Yes."
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That shows that people see it as business.
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If pesticide sells, they sell pesticides,
if organic sells, they sell organic.
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You buy pesticides
or other organic pesticides
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or certificate from us saying
you haven't used any of these things.
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Farmers are made into consumers.
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But what are our consumers doing?
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Then what we did is
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we brought some consumers
in Hyderabad together
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to form a consumer cooperative
called Sahaja Aharam.
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We also brought all farmers together
to form farmers cooperative,
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so that they can market directly.
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Today we have 20 farmer cooperatives
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who produce organically
and directly sell in the market.
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While many of you worry
about organic food prices,
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the organic Sahaja Aharam prices
are 20% lower than the market prices,
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and 75% of what the consumer pays
goes to the farmers.
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In the regular market it is
just 20% which goes to the farmer.
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(Applause)
00:16:32
What do I see from here?
00:16:33
I see a ray of hope.
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It's possible.
00:16:36
If all of us can join hands together,
we can make a change.
00:16:39
But it's a long way to go
in terms of Government Policies.
00:16:43
Still there is a serious crisis
in agriculture.
00:16:45
Yesterday, you may have seen
about farmer's suicide.
00:16:48
Today, this morning's newspaper,
you may have seen.
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Numbers of farmers are dying.
00:16:52
It's a responsibility of all of us.
00:16:53
Business as usual is not an option.
00:16:55
We need to change as consumers,
we need change as farmers.
00:17:00
We all need to come together
to pressurize government
00:17:04
to make a change.
00:17:06
Otherwise, the future is very, very bleak.
00:17:09
Thank you.
00:17:10
(Applause)
