on small farming in india:
India is a land of small farmers, with 650 million of her 1 billion people living on the land and 80 per cent farmers owning less than 2 ha of land. In other words, the land provides livelihood security for 65 per cent of the people, and the small farmers provide food security for 1 billion.
(...) Policies driven by corporate globalisation are pushing farmers off the land, and peasants out of agriculture. This is not a natural evolutionary process. It is a violent and imposed process. The 150,000 farmers suicides are one aspect of this violence. The killing of dozens of peasants in Nandigram who were resisting land acquisition for a Special Economic Zone is another aspect of the violence involved in the forced uprooting of India's small farmers.
(...) On 26th March 2007, while addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry, Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh stated, " As I said recently in Parliament, we have to recognize that in a country like ours, where the average size of landholding is small, there are limitations to what you can do to improve agricultural productivity." (Pioneer, 27/03/07) This is a false assumption, as Navdanya's work over two decades has shown. In fact, it is the small biodiverse farm, which has higher productivity than large industrial farms. Large farmers and industrial farming has serious limitations on increasing agricultural productivity.
(...) Small farmers have tremendous scope for increasing productivity because the natural capital - the soil, the water, the biodiversity, can be enhanced through conservation and rejuvenation. On large farms, natural resources are exploited and depleted. The soil looses fertility through chemical fertilizers; it is compacted by heavy machinery. Water is over exploited since chemical farming needs ten times more water than ecological farming. Biodiversity is eroded since industrial scale farming can only be practised as a monoculture. And energy use is intensified, contributing to global warming. The small farms of India have the highest potential for increasing productivity. There are scientific reasons for this. A small farmer can intensify biodiversity and the higher the biodiversity, the higher the productivity and stability and sustainability of agriculture. A large farm has to intensify external inputs such agrichemicals and fossil fuels, which lower the productivity, and lead to non-sustainability and economic and ecological vulnerability. When the industrial model of high external inputs is imposed on small farmers, the result is debt and suicides. The industrial model of farming is at the root of farmers' suicides. Yet, the disease is being offered as a cure.
(...) The Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar, whose job is to look after farmers' and provide them livelihood security has stated that farmers' need to be "weaned" off the land.
(...) The future defined by the majority of small farmers of India is in terms of their land sovereignty and food sovereignty. India needs her small farmers because her freedom is in their hands. Wherever the totally inappropriate model of industrial corporate agriculture has been applied, farmers are in distress, the soil has been destroyed, and the water has been over exploited and polluted. And wherever the government has pushed rural communities off the land for industrialization, it has had to use violence and has created zones where Naxalism is viewed as the only alternative.