I wrote a piece for the New York Times Fixes column about the rise of pesticide-free farming in southern India.
The over-use of agrochemicals, combined with poor irrigation and extortionate credit has left millions of Indian smallholder farmers struggling.
But their main source of farming advice is often the same commercial dealers who sell them pesticides and fertilizer, and buy their harvest.
In southern India alternative agroecological techniques are being spread though a different route: women’s self help groups.
Led by female farmers, over 2 million smallholders have now ditched chemical pesticides, and are using a combination of modern best-practice and traditional techniques to manage their crops.
Farmers need to be persuaded to try a completely new way of farming, and this that “happens through the group meetings, and through the credibility that the self-help groups have in the women’s lives,” says Vijay Kumar, a Ministry of Rural Affairs official. “They get the courage to try it from the group.”
Sylvia Rowley 