The Vandana Shiva Reader

Toward a New Agriculture Paradigm

Health per Acre

The Old Paradigm of Agriculture

The old paradigm of food and agriculture is clearly broken. As the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) carried out by four hundred scientists over six years for the United Nations has noted, “Business as usual is no longer an option.”

The old paradigm of agriculture has its roots in war. An industry that had grown by making explosives and chemicals for the war remodeled itself as the agrochemical industry when the wars ended. Explosive factories started to make synthetic fertilizers; war chemicals started to be used as pesticides and herbicides. The Bhopal tragedy in 1984, when a gas leak from a pesticide plant killed three thousand people, thirty thousand since then, is a stark reminder that pesticides kill. Pesticides in agriculture continue to kill farm workers. And as the Navdanya report Poisons in Our Food shows, there is a link between disease epidemics like cancer and the use of pesticides in agriculture. A daily “cancer train” leaves Punjab, the land of the Green Revolution in India, with cancer victims.

The chemical push changed the paradigm of agriculture. Instead of working with ecological processes and taking the well-being and health of the entire agroecosystem with its diverse species into account, agriculture was reduced to an external input system adapted to chemicals. Instead of recognizing that farmers have been breeders over millennia, giving us the rich agrobiodiversity that is the basis of food security, breeding was reduced to breeding uniform industrial varieties to respond to chemicals. Instead of small farms producing diversity, agriculture became focused on large monoculture farms producing monocultures of a handful of commodities. Correspondingly, the human diet shifted from the use of eighty-five hundred plant species to about eight globally traded commodities.

The scientific paradigm was also transformed. Instead of a holistic approach, agriculture became compartmentalized into fragmented disciplines based on a reductionist, mechanistic paradigm.

Just as GDP fails to measure the real economy, the health of nature and society, the category of “yield,” designed to measure the productivity of agriculture, fails to measure real costs and real outputs of farming systems. It leaves out input costs, which if internalized would make industrial agriculture based on the old paradigm a negative economy, using ten times more inputs than it produces as a commodity. Further, it leaves out the outputs lost, as chemical-driven agriculture imposes monocultures and destroys diversity. In India, the Green Revolution drove out pulses and oilseeds and greens from the farming system. Rice and wheat production increased, but pulses and oilseeds disappeared. The studies of Navdanya/Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology show that the increase of rice and wheat is explained by more acreage of rice and wheat, and more irrigation water made available. It is not a result of so-called miracle seeds and agrochemicals. Leaving out the external inputs and the biodiverse outputs thus creates a pseudo-productivity, making industrial agriculture appear the only solution to hunger, when in reality it is at the root of hunger and malnutrition by destroying sources of food in biodiversity. And even the “yield” of a monoculture is an unreliable measure. As the UN observed, the so called high-yielding varieties of the Green Revolution should in fact be called high-response varieties since they are bred for responding to chemicals and are not high yielding in and of themselves.

The narrow measure of “yield” propelled agriculture into deepening monocultures, displacing diversity and eroding natural and social wealth. The social and ecological impacts of this broken model have pushed the planet and society into deep crisis. Industrial monoculture agriculture has caused the extinction of more than 75 percent of agrobiodiversity. Seventy-five percent of bees have been killed by toxic pesticides. Einstein had cautioned “when the last bee disappears, humans will disappear.” Seventy-five percent of the water on the planet is being depleted and polluted for intensive irrigation for chemical intensive industrial agriculture. The nitrate in water from industrial farms is creating “dead zones” in the oceans.¹ Seventy-five percent of land and soil degradation is caused by chemical industrial farming. Forty percent of all greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change come from a fossil fuel, chemical-intensive industrial globalized system of agriculture. The fossil fuels used to make fertilizers, run farm machinery, and move food thousands of miles contribute to carbon dioxide emissions. Chemical nitrogen fertilizers emit nitrogen oxide, which is 300 percent more destabilizing for the climate than carbon dioxide, and factory farming is a major source of methane.²

Although this ecological destruction of nature’s economy is justified in terms of “feeding people,” the problem of hunger has grown: 1 billion people are permanently hungry. Another 2 billion suffer from food-related diseases like obesity, which are being increasingly related to micronutrient deficiencies.

When the focus is the production of commodities for trade instead of food for nourishment, hunger and malnutrition are the outcome. Only 10 percent of the corn and soy grown is used as food. The rest goes for animal feed and biofuel. Commodities do not feed people; food does. Seventy percent of food comes from small family farms, not industrial commodity-producing farms. To expand industrial farming and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the name of feeding the hungry is a recipe for increasing the food and malnutrition crisis.

A high-cost external input system is artificially kept afloat with $400 billion in subsidies. That is more than $1 billion a day.

The “cheap” commodities have a very high cost financially, ecologically, and socially. Industrial, chemical agriculture displaces productive rural families. It creates debt; debt and mortgages are the main reasons for the disappearance of the family farm. In extreme cases in India, as in the cotton belt, debt created by the purchase of high-cost seed and chemical inputs has pushed more than 128,000 farmers to suicide in a little over a decade. Getting out of this suicide economy has become urgent for the well-being of farmers, eaters, and all life on earth.

The Emerging Paradigm of Agriculture

A scientifically and ecologically robust paradigm of agriculture is emerging in the form of agroecology and organic farming as an alternative to the broken paradigm of industrial agriculture. At the ecological level, agroecology and organic farming rejuvenate nature’s economy, on which sustainable food security depends—soil, biodiversity, and water.

Chemical agriculture treats soil as inert and an empty container for chemical fertilizers. The new paradigm recognizes the soil as living, host to billions of soil organisms that create soil fertility. Their well-being is vital to human well-being. Chemical agriculture destroys biodiversity. Ecological agriculture conserves and rejuvenates biodiversity, and through biodiversity intensification, it increases the food and nutrition output, or health per acre. Chemical agriculture depletes and pollutes water. Organic farming conserves water by increasing the water-holding capacity of soils through recycling organic matter. The soil becomes like a sponge, which can absorb more water, thus reducing water use, but also contributing to resilience to climate change. Biodiversity and soils rich in organic matter are the best strategy for climate resilience and climate adaptation.

While rejuvenating natural capital, ecological agriculture also rejuvenates social capital and increases human well-being and happiness. While reducing the ecological footprint, organic agriculture increases output when measured through multifunctional benefits instead of the reductionist category of “yield.” As Navdanya’s research on biodiverse organic systems has shown, ecological systems produce higher biodiverse outputs and higher incomes for rural families. Our report Health per Acre shows that when measured in terms of nutrition per acre, ecological systems produce more food. We can double food production ecologically. The false argument that GMOs are needed to increase food production is a desperate attempt to extend the life of a failing paradigm. The new paradigm of agriculture creates living economies, living democracies, and living cultures that are the foundation for earth democracy and increase the well-being of society and all life-forms.

India faces a dual crisis related to food and agriculture. We have already touched on the agrarian crisis, tragically highlighted by farmers’ suicides, driven by debt that is largely caused by high-cost chemical inputs. The other aspect is the malnutrition and hunger crisis. Every fourth Indian is hungry.³ Every third woman is severely malnourished. Every second child is “wasted.” This is not “Shining India” but “Starving India.” The agrarian crisis and the food and nutrition crisis are really connected.

Taking note of the hunger and malnutrition crisis, the government is trying to put together a Food Security Act. However, there are two serious limitations to the proposed act. First, it leaves out nutrition. Without nutrition there can be no right to food or health. Malnutrition is leading to a public health crisis—of hunger on the one hand, and obesity, diabetes, and other health problems on the other. Second, it leaves out agriculture, food producers, and food-production systems. Without agriculture and nutrition, there can be no food security.

Both aspects of the food crisis are related to the fact that food production has become chemical intensive and is focused on “yield per acre.” However, yield per acre ignores the loss of nutrition that is leading to the malnutrition crisis. It also ignores the increase in costs of chemical inputs, which traps farmers in debt and leads to suicides. “Yield per acre” measures one crop grown in a monoculture. This ignores the lost nutrition in the displaced biodiversity. Thus the Green Revolution led to an increase of rice and wheat with chemical-intensive, capital-intensive, and water-intensive inputs, but it displaced pulses, oilseeds, millets, greens, vegetables, and fruits from the field and from the diet.

Navdanya’s Health per Acre shows that a shift to biodiverse organic farming and ecological intensification increases output of nutrition while reducing input costs. When agriculture output is measured in terms of “health per acre” and “nutrition per acre” instead of “yield per acre,” biodiverse ecological systems have a much higher output. This should be the strategy for protecting the livelihoods of farmers as well the right to food and the right to health of all our people.

The paradigm shift we propose is a shift from monocultures to diversity; from chemical-intensive agriculture to ecologically intensive, biodiversity-intensive agriculture; from external inputs to internal inputs; from capital-intensive production to low-cost or zero-cost production; from yield per acre to health and nutrition per acre; from food as a commodity to food as nourishment and nutrition. This shift addresses the multiple crises related to food systems. It shows how we can protect the environment while protecting our farmers and our health. And we can do this while lowering costs of food production and distribution. By maximizing health per acre, we can ensure that every child, woman, and man in India has access to healthy, nutritious, safe, and good food.

Food, nutrition, health, prosperity, future, and growth and their opposites—hunger, disease, poverty, hopelessness, and the nation’s downfall—are much-debated topics that, intuitively, are not only correlated but also have a causal connection. Agriculture, a time-tested profession, one of the oldest in the world, is no longer an economically viable endeavor for most. However, the question to be answered is whether our nation is committing suicide as well as our farmers. The primary objective of a nation’s agriculture is to promote health and feed the people, propagating a diet that provides all the necessary nutrients. However, profit maximization has been promoted as the objective of agriculture. Tragically, the more profit-oriented agriculture becomes, the higher the farmers’ indebtedness and farmers’ suicides, and the deeper the food and nutrition crisis. The irony is that, despite all the claims, maximization of profit for farmers is still far away from realization,⁴ but the nation has been paying the enormous cost.

Most proponents of conventional agriculture claim that pesticides, one of the many chemicals used in agriculture, have insignificant implications for human health. Nevertheless, millions of tons of pesticides pumped into the environment every year in the name of highyield agriculture somehow manage to reach the human body as well as animals and water supplies. Quantifiable levels of a number of pesticides have been detected in human milk, which puts breast-feeding infants at probable risk.⁵ The alarming level of chemicals in the honey sold in Indian markets triggered much discussion recently. Science and technology were established to benefit human beings, but in current agricultural practice, they are benefiting human greed. As a major contributor to global warming, the conventional form of agriculture has negative health impacts as well. We shall limit our discussion in this chapter to the effects of conventional agriculture on the health of individuals and the population as a whole. This report compares the nutritional and health aspects of food grown organically and food grown conventionally. The scope of the work ranges from nutrition produced per acre of farmland by the two systems of agriculture to disease trends observed in the population and how such trends may be related to the food we consume. Conventional agriculture measures “yield” per acre while externalizing costs of chemical inputs and the environmental and health costs of chemicals. “Yield” measures monoculture outputs, while what we need to assess is diverse outputs of a farming system. Yield also fails to tell us about the nutrition of food. With a focus on health and nutrition, we measure health per acre instead of yield per acre.

Nutrition may be defined as the science of food and its relationship to health.⁶ It is primarily related to the role played by nutrients in body growth, development, and maintenance. Good nutrition means “maintaining a nutritional status that enables us to grow well and enjoy good health.” Nutrients are organic and inorganic complexes contained in food. Each nutrient has a specific function in the body. Nutrients may be classified as below:

1. Macronutrients: they form the main bulk of food. These are protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

2. Micronutrients: they are required in small amounts. These are vitamins and minerals.

There are several bioactive compounds in plant food, and several health benefits are attributed to the presence of such compounds in diet. Studies have shown that individuals with increased consumption of fruits and vegetables showed a lower incidence of chronic noncommunicable diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and age-related decline in cognition.⁷ Scientists agree upon the health benefits of the consumption of fruits and vegetables. The American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society recommend a generous daily intake of fruits and vegetables.

Earlier it was thought that the health benefits of fruits and vegetables could be due to the antioxidant effects of various micronutrients present in high quantity in them. This highlighted the need for more research to isolate such protective compounds in plant food for therapeutic purposes. Scientists studied the incidence of different chronic diseases in individuals who consumed vitamin, mineral, and antioxidant supplements. Incidentally, these individuals were no healthier than the normal population in terms of incidence of various cancers, heart diseases, and other chronic diseases. Researchers were compelled to think outside the box. There was something extra in plant food that was unknown. Finally, such compounds as phytochemicals, phenols, flavonoids, and so on in plants were recognized as health-promoting chemicals. Studies have shown the link between these bioactive compounds and prevention of chronic noncommunicable diseases.⁸ These compounds contribute significantly to the total antioxidant activity of fruits and vegetables. These compounds deliver an electron to reactive oxygen species (ROS, which are produced in the body as a result of stress, smoking, disease, and so on) and render them ineffective. ROS are highly reactive and damage cellular macromolecules (protein, membrane, DNA, RNA, and the like). ROS are thought to cause cancers, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and other chronic diseases in the long run.

Case Study 1

Under monocropping of paddy, a yield of twelve quarts per acre was observed, whereas under mixed cropping a production of three quarts of mandua (ragi), two quarts of jhangora (sanwa millet), four quarts of gahat (horse gram), and five quarts of bhatt (black bean or rajmah) was realized.

Organic mixed farming produced 276 percent more protein per acre of farmland than that produced by conventional monocropping. Organic mixed cropping produced 10,483 percent more carotene, 188 percent more thiamine, and 83 percent more riboflavin per acre of farmland than produced by conventional monocropping. Organic mixed cropping produced generous amounts of vitamin B, folic acid, and vitamin C, which conventional monocropping did not produce. However, conventional monocropping produced 39 percent more niacin per acre of farmland than that produced by organic mixed farming. The increase in the production of niacin and choline is attributed to the fact that paddy is a rich source of these vitamins and twelve quarts of paddy were produced.

The total amount of major minerals produced per acre of farmland in organic mixed cropping was 16,527.8 grams. The total amount of major minerals produced per acre of farmland in conventional monocropping was 4,322 grams. Organic mixed cropping produced 282 percent more major minerals per acre of farmland than produced by conventional monocropping. Moreover, organic mixed cropping produced 163 percent more iron per acre of farmland than conventional monocropping.

The total amount of trace minerals produced per acre of farmland in organic mixed cropping was 1,299,572 milligrams. The total amount of trace minerals produced per acre of farmland in conventional monocropping was 33,924 milligrams. Organic mixed cropping produced 3,731 percent more trace minerals than conventional monocropping.

Case Study 2

Organic mixed cropping produced 26 percent more protein per acre of farmland than conventional monocropping. Organic mixed cropping produced 3,000 percent more carotene and 88 percent more thiamine than conventional monocropping. Moreover, organic mixed cropping produced folic acid, vitamin B, and vitamin C, which conventional monocropping did not produce. However, monocropping produced more niacin and choline because paddy is a rich source of these vitamins.

The total amount of minerals produced per acre of farmland in organic mixed cropping was 12,696 grams. The total amount of minerals produced per acre of farmland in conventional monocropping was 4,322 grams.

Organic mixed cropping produced 194 percent more minerals than conventional monocropping per acre of farmland. Moreover, organic mixed cropping produced 27 percent more iron. The total amount of trace minerals produced per acre of farmland in organic mixed cropping was 15,63,918 milligrams. The total amount of trace minerals produced per acre of farmland in conventional monocropping was 33,924 milligrams. Organic mixed cropping produced 4,510 percent more trace minerals than conventional monocropping per acre of farmland.

Researchers and doctors globally have reached a collective consensus that one should derive one’s nutrition from diverse sources. How will our meal plate, or thali, be diverse if our farms aren’t? There is a concept in finance that emphasizes diversification of a portfolio to reduce risk; this seems an equally valuable concept for agriculture, health, and nutrition. According to Rui Hai Liu from the Department of Food Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, “We believe that a recommendation that consumers eat 5 to 10 servings of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables daily is an appropriate strategy for significantly reducing the risk of chronic diseases and to meet their nutrient requirements for optimum health.”⁹ How can we expect to consume such a wide variety of foods if we do not grow such a wide variety?

Our per capita nutrition, or average nutrition per person per day, has declined significantly from 1975 to 1999. That period is also significant from the Green Revolution point of view—in 1975 the effects of the Green Revolution and conventional farming were negligible, whereas by 1999 conventional farming practices had gripped our society substantially. One probable reason for such a change in average nutritional consumption is the population explosion. However, to blame everything on the rise in population would be shortsighted and superficial. Further extensive research is required to prove a definite correlation.

Another interesting fact that came out was that an acre of farmland under conventional agriculture produced low amounts of most nutrients. However, such farmland produced a few odd nutrients excessively. This has probably affected our national health; on the one hand we are struggling to treat and eradicate deficiency diseases like protein energy malnutrition, night blindness, anemia, and so on, and on the other hand the nation is distressed by the debilitating effects of excessive nutrition, such as obesity, hypervitaminosis, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and the like. However, in order to prove a definite correlation, further extensive research is called for.

Diversification is not important just from the “amount of nutrient produced per acre” point of view. Research has suggested that traditional foods and different varieties of fruits and vegetables contain several bioactive compounds that prevent cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and other degenerative diseases. All such compounds have not been identified to date, the role of such bioactive compounds in preventing these degenerative diseases has not yet been pinpointed, and an ideal blend of nutrients for human consumption has not been determined. We are almost there, but not quite. As a result, medical practitioners prescribe a diet derived from varied sources.¹⁰

In order to provide a more comprehensive picture, we took the average (arithmetic mean) of nutrients produced per acre of farmland from the case studies above. The sample mean of our report should be a fairly good estimator of the population mean. The population in our case is the total arable land in India. Hence, the average production of nutrients per acre of farmland is a reasonably fair point estimator of the average production per acre of farmland on a national scale. Moreover, we have collected data from different states ranging from an arid state, Rajasthan, to an organic state, Uttaranchal. As a result the margin of error should be fairly low. The purpose of the statistics is to allow the reader to glimpse the actual effect of the two forms of agriculture on a national level. The questions are how to maximize nutrient production, how to minimize environmental risk, and how to ensure a sustainable alternative to solve the national and global food crisis.

If we switch an acre of farmland from conventional monocropping to organic mixed cropping, we shall be able to produce 124 more kilograms of protein. The quality of mixed-cropping protein is better than that of monocropping protein. The organic mixed-cropping protein is complete because it provides all the essential amino acids—it is comparable to animal protein. Vegetarian protein (except soy) may be an inadequate source of all essential amino acids individually. However, when vegetarian proteins are mixed, they become an adequate source of all essential amino acids. For example, the protein in roti or dal, individually, is incomplete because it does not contain all the essential amino acids, but when roti and dal are consumed together, they become a complete source of all essential amino acids.¹¹ Hence, the protein produced in an acre of farmland under organic mixed cropping is more complete than protein produced in an acre under conventional monocropping.

On average, organic mixed cropping produces 124 more kilograms of protein than conventional monocropping per acre of farmland, enough to fulfill the protein requirement of two thousand adults for a day. According to the Central Water Commission, government of India, the total cultivable land (as of 2003–2004) in India is 183 million hectares, which is equal to approximately 452,202,848 acres. If all of this land is used for organic mixed cropping instead of conventional monocropping, the country can produce 56,073,153 more metric tons of protein. This is enough to fulfill the protein requirement of 2.5 billion adults for the entire year. A fact worthy of notice is that we have counted here only the difference of 124 kilograms of protein per acre between organic mixed cropping and conventional monocropping. If we consider the entire amount of protein produced in the country through organic mixed cropping, by projecting our sample average to the total cultivable land, we would produce enough protein to fulfill the protein requirement of approximately 5 billion adults for a whole year. This is enough protein to feed our entire population and to eradicate protein energy malnutrition from the planet.

If an acre of farmland is diverted from conventional monocropping to organic mixed cropping, we shall produce additional food containing 12,02,795 kilocalories of extra energy. This is enough to supply 2,500 kilocalories of energy to 481 adults for a day. If we project this figure to 183 million hectares of total cultivable land in India, we shall produce additional calories in food sufficient to fulfill the energy requirement of 600 million adults for the whole year. We would again like to emphasize that we considered only the extra calories produced by switching from conventional to organic. If we consider the sample average amount of calories produced per acre through organic mixed cropping, then on a national scale, we shall produce enough calories to supply 2,500 kilocalories a day to 2.4 billion adults for one year. If we switch from conventional to organic, we can ensure that no individual is hungry in our country. In fact, if only India switches from conventional agriculture to organic agriculture, we can resolve the global hunger problem because it is just the bottom billion of the world population that is hungry.

If an acre of farmland is used for organic mixed cropping rather than conventional monocropping, we shall produce 2,174 milligrams of carotene more than that produced otherwise. This is enough carotene to fulfill the vitamin A requirement of approximately 900 adults for a day. On a national scale, we would produce 982,670 more metric tons of carotene organically than produced conventionally. In other words, we would produce 164,106 more metric tons of retinol equivalent (RE) (1 unit of B-carotene = 0.167 unit of RE) than produced conventionally.¹² That amount is sufficient to satisfy the daily vitamin A requirement of 750 million adults for one year. It is sufficient to completely reverse 1.3 billion early cases of xerophthalmia, assuming that all this retinol equivalent in food can be isolated and administered to xerophthalmia patients. The term xerophthalmia (dry eye) comprises all the ocular manifestations of vitamin A deficiency, ranging from night blindness to keratomalacia. Vitamin A deficiency first causes night blindness and then progresses to corneal ulcers—a serious condition that may leave residual corneal scar, affecting vision. Keratomalacia, or liquifaction of the cornea, is a major cause of blindness in India—the cornea becomes soft and may burst open. This is an example of the kind of significant impact that switching to organic on a national scale could have on the health of our population. If we use the sample average amount of carotene produced per acre of farmland by organic mixed cropping to calculate the total amount of carotene produced nationally, we can produce enough to fulfill the daily vitamin A requirement of 1.5 billion adults for one year.

Similarly, the extra amount of thiamine produced per acre by switching from conventional to organic is enough to supply thiamine to approximately 2,100 adults for a day. On a national scale, the extra amount of thiamine produced by switching from conventional to organic would be sufficient to fulfill the daily thiamine requirement of 2.6 billion adults for one year. If we consider all the thiamine that can be produced organically in the country, then the thiamine produced would be sufficient for approximately 5 billion adults for a year. Minor degrees of thiamine deficiency is endemic in certain sections of the country.¹³ With organic farming on a national scale, we can uproot and eradicate all forms of thiamine deficiency from our population.

Organic mixed cropping in an acre of farmland produces extra riboflavin, compared to conventional monocropping, that can fulfill the recommended riboflavin allowance of 1,000 adults for a day. On a national scale, we could supply adequate amounts of riboflavin to 1.2 billion extra adults for a year. Riboflavin deficiency is widespread in India, particularly where rice is the staple.¹⁴ The fact is that we are not currently producing enough riboflavin; organic mixed cropping seems to be a promising solution to resolve the riboflavin crisis.

Folic acid deficiency can occur rapidly in pregnant and lactating mothers and growing children because body stores of folate are not large—about five to ten milligrams. An acre of farmland through organic mixed cropping can produce extra folic acid that can nourish approximately 1,375 pregnant mothers for a day. On a national scale, the extra amount of folate produced through organic mixed cropping compared to its conventional counterpart is sufficient to supply folic acid to 1.7 billion pregnant woman, who require four times as much folic acid as a normal adult, for one year.

Our sample shows that vitamin C produced by conventional monocropping was more than that produced by organic mixed cropping. Nevertheless, there are a few points that need to be highlighted. Although the mean production of vitamin C of our sample favors conventional monocropping, the median value is zero in conventional monocropping compared to organic mixed cropping, which has a median value of 4,470 milligrams. We extrapolate from this that a farmer in Rajasthan or Sikkim, practicing conventional monocropping, would suffer from vitamin C deficiency, whereas a farmer in Uttaranchal who produced excess vitamin C would expel the excess in his urine—we assumed that the farmers consumed only the food that they grew.

According to Virginia Worthington’s research, organically grown food has 27 percent more vitamin C, on an average, than conventionally grown food.¹⁵ If we include the difference of 27 percent in our sample mean, the difference decreases drastically.

Iron is of great importance to human health. The adult human body contains about three to four grams of iron, of which 60–70 percent is present in blood. Iron is required for many functions in the body, such as hemoglobin formation, brain development and function, regulation of body temperature, muscle activity, and catecholamine metabolism. The central function of iron is oxygen transport and cell respiration. The bioavailability of nonhaem iron (mostly vegetarian) is poor owing to the presence of phytates, oxalates, carbonates, phosphates, and dietary fiber. The Indian diet, which is predominantly vegetarian, contains large amounts of such inhibitors—phytates in bran, phosphates in egg yolk, tannin in tea, and oxalates in vegetables. Deficiency of iron in diet leading to iron deficiency anemia or nutritional anemia is a major public health problem in India.

When an acre of farmland is used for organic mixed cropping in place of conventional monocropping, thirty-nine grams of extra iron is produced. This amount is sufficient to nourish 16,250 lactating mothers with iron for a day. On a national scale, the extra amount of iron produced organically would be sufficient to meet the requirement of 20 billion hypothetical lactating mothers. To reach this conclusion, we assumed that all of the iron consumed would be absorbed.

Organic mixed cropping, on average, produces 106 percent more copper, 61 percent more manganese, 243 percent more molybednum, 64 percent more zinc, and 120 percent more chromium than conventional monocropping. Collectively, organic mixed cropping produces 72 percent more of these trace minerals than conventional monocropping does. Micronutrient deficiency is increasingly being observed in soil and in humans.

Biodiverse Ecological Systems Produce More Food

Just as the food crisis is a consequence of a food system designed for profits, greed, and control, we can redesign the food system for sustainability and food justice. And this redesigning is precisely what we are doing at Navdanya. Over twenty years of research and practice, we are finding that biodiverse ecological production systems are the solution to hunger and malnutrition, to the agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides, to the erosion of soil, water, and biodiversity, and to the climate crisis.

The Green Revolution and genetic engineering have been offered as “intensive” farming, creating a false impression that they produce more food per acre. However, industrial agriculture is chemically intensive, fossil fuel intensive, and capital intensive. The first two qualities produce more toxics and greenhouse gases and the third more debt.

To produce more food and nutrition, we need to design production systems that are biodiversity intensive and ecologically intensive. Biodiversity-intensive systems produce more food, nutrition, and health per acre than industrial chemical monocultures. And by saving on costs of external inputs, they create more wealth per acre for farmers. When measured in terms of contribution to nutrition, health, and rural incomes, industrial systems have very low productivity. Not only is the measure of productivity of industrial agriculture partial because all inputs, including resource and energy inputs, are not taken into account, but it is also partial because not all outputs are taken into account. Only the production of monoculture commodities is counted.

Green Revolution systems have high “yield” but low output. And it is output that feeds the soil and people, not the yield of globally traded commodities that are used for biofuel or animal feed. Ecological agriculture is based on mixed and rotational cropping, and the production of a diversity of crops. Navdanya’s work on biodiverse farming has shown that the more biodiversity on the farm, the higher the output.¹⁶

Perhaps one of the most fallacious claims propagated by Green Revolution proponents is the assertion that HYVs have reduced the acreage necessary to grow these crops, therefore preserving millions of hectares of biodiversity. Perpetuating this myth, Dennis Avery, a promoter of chemical farming, has recently written, “Is the Green Movement finally ready to face the global need to triple crop yields and drop its dedication to land selfish organic farming? The planet’s biodiversity is at stake.” India’s experience tells us that instead of more land being released for conservation, by destroying diversity and multiple uses of land, the industrial system actually increases pressure on the land since each acre of a monoculture provides a single output and the displaced outputs have to be grown on additional acres. And globally, the chemical-intensive, land-extensive system has had to spread to the Amazon rainforest. This is not land-saving, biodiversity-conserving agriculture—it is land-destroying, biodiversity-destroying agriculture.

The polycultures of ecological agricultural systems have evolved because more output can be harvested from a given area planted with diverse crops than from an equivalent area consisting of separate patches of monocultures. For example, in plantings of sorghum and pigeon pea mixtures, one hectare will produce the same yields as 0.94 hectares of sorghum monocultures and 0.68 hectares of pigeon pea monoculture. Thus one hectare of polyculture produces what 1.62 hectares of monoculture can produce. This is called the land-equivalent ratio (LER).

Increased land-use efficiency and higher LER have been reported for polycultures of millet/groundnut (1.26); maize/bean (1.38); millet/sorghum (1.53); maize/pigeon pea (1.85); maize/cocoyan/sweet potato (2.08); cassava/maize/groundnut (>2.51). The monocultures of the Green Revolution thus actually reduced the food yields per acre previously achieved through mixtures of diverse crops. This shows the falsity of the argument often made that chemically intensive agriculture and genetic engineering will save biodiversity by releasing land from food production. In fact, since monocultures require more land, biodiversity is destroyed twice over—once on the farm, and then on the additional acreage required to produce the outputs a monoculture has displaced. Further, since chemicals kill diverse species, chemical agriculture can hardly be promoted as conserving biodiversity.

Not only is the productivity measure distorted by ignoring resource inputs and focusing only on labor, but it is also distorted by looking only at a single and partial output rather than the total output. A myth promoted by the one-dimensional monoculture paradigm is that biodiversity reduces yields and productivity, and monocultures increase yields and productivity. However, since yields and productivity are theoretically constructed terms, they change according to the context. “Yield” usually refers to production per unit area of a single crop. Planting only one crop in the entire field as a monoculture will of course increase its yield. Planting multiple crops in a mixture will have low yields of individual crops but will have high total output of food.

The Mayan peasants in the Chiapas are characterized as unproductive because they produce only two tons of corn per acre. However, the overall food output is twenty tons per acre. In the terraced fields of the high Himalaya, women peasants grow jhangora (barnyard millet), marsha (amaranth), tur (pigeon pea), urad (black gram), gahat (horse gram), soybean (glysine max), bhat (glysine soy), rayans (rice bean), swanta (cowpea), and koda (finger millet) in mixtures and rotations. The total output, even in bad years, is six times more than industrially farmed rice monocultures.

Not only do biodiverse-intensive and ecologically intensive systems produce more food per acre, but they also produce much higher nutrition per acre. For example, a mixed organic farm in the Himalaya produces 9,000 kilograms of maize, radish, mustard greens, and peas. A chemically farmed maize monoculture yields 5,000 kilograms. This is 1,000 kilograms more maize than in the biodiverse system, but 4,000 kilograms less food. In terms of nutrition per acre, the biodiverse farming system is much more productive than the chemical monocultures. It provides 305 grams of calcium and 29.3 grams of iron compared to the monoculture.

A baranaja (twelve-crop) system produces 2,680 kilograms of food per acre, compared to 2,186 of a maize monoculture. In terms of protein, the production is 4,214 versus 242 kilograms; carbohydrates, 1,622.94 versus 1,447.14 kilograms; fat, 131.8 versus 78.7 kilograms; energy, 9,359,470 versus 7,476,120 kilocalories. In terms of vitamins, baranaja produces 1,360.9 versus 1,967 milligrams beta carotene in the case of maize monoculture; in folic acid, 2,206.3 to 437 milligrams. Minerals are: calcium, 5,052 versus 218 grams; iron, 143.9 versus 50.3 grams; phosphorous, 9,505 versus 7,607 grams; magnesium, 3,604 versus 3,038 grams; potassium, 11,186 versus 6,252 grams.¹⁷

Since providing nutrition and nourishment are the main aims of agriculture, in food production, nutrition per acre is a more accurate measure of productivity than the yield of commodities in a monoculture. Also, the higher nutrition in biodiverse-intensive farms further intensifies the ecological processes. The nutrients produced by plants become food for humans and food for soil organisms, which in turn feed the plants that feed the humans and the soils. The perennial nutrient cycle continues to be sustained and can even be intensified through biodiversity intensification and ecological intensification.

A model of nutrients for soils based on heavy inputs of nonrenewable N-P-K impoverishes the soil, our diets, and our health. In any case, industrial sources of nonrenewable N-P-K are running out. Ecological nutrients are renewable; they will last forever, and we can actually increase their availability by increasing the biodiversity of soil organisms and plants.

The main argument used for the industrialization of food and corporatization of agriculture is the low productivity of the small farmer. Surely these families on their little plots of land are incapable of meeting the world’s need for food! Industrial agriculture claims that it increases yields, hence creating the image that more food is produced per unit acre by industrial means than by the traditional practices of smallholders. However, sustainable, diversified small-farm systems are actually more productive.

Industrial agriculture productivity is high only in the restricted context of a “part of a part” of the system, whether it be the forest or of the farm. For example, “high-yield” plantations pick one tree species among thousands, for yields of one part of the tree (for example, wood pulp), whereas traditional forestry practices use many parts of many forest species. “High-yield” Green Revolution cropping patterns select one crop among hundreds, such as wheat, for the use of just one part, the grain. These high partial yields do not translate into high total yields, because everything else in the farm system goes to waste. Usually the yield of a single crop like wheat or maize is singled out and compared to yields of new varieties. This calculation is biased to make the new varieties appear “high yielding” even when, at the systems level, they may not be. Traditional farming systems are based on mixed and rotational cropping systems of cereals, pulses, and oilseeds, with different varieties of each crop, while the Green Revolution package is based on genetically uniform monocultures. No realistic assessments are ever made of the yield of the diverse crop outputs in the mixed and rotational systems.

Productivity is quite different, however, when it is measured in the context of diversity. Biodiversity-based measures of productivity show that small farmers can feed the world. Their multiple yields result in truly high productivity, composed as they are of the multiple yields of diverse species used for diverse purposes. Thus, productivity is not lower on smaller units of land: on the contrary, it is higher. In Brazil, the productivity of a farm of up to ten hectares was $85 a hectare, while the productivity of a five-hundred-hectare farm was $2 per hectare. In India, a farm of up to five acres had a productivity of Rs. 735 per acre, while a thirty-five-acre farm had a productivity of Rs. 346 per acre.

Diversity produces more than monocultures. But monocultures are profitable to industry both for markets and political control. The shift from high-productivity diversity to low-productivity monocultures is possible because the resources destroyed are taken from the poor, while the higher commodity production brings benefits to those with economic power. The polluter does not pay in industrial agriculture either of the chemical era or the biotechnology era. Ironically, while the poor go hungry, it is the hunger of the poor that is used to justify the very agricultural strategies that deepen their hunger.

Diversity has been destroyed in agriculture on the assumption that it is associated with low productivity. This is, however, a false assumption both at the level of individual crops and at the level of farming systems. Diverse native varieties are often as high yielding or more high yielding than industrially bred varieties. In addition, diversity in farming systems has a higher output at the total systems level than one-dimensional monocultures. Comparative yields of native and Green Revolution varieties in farmers’ fields have been assessed by Navdanya, a seed conservation and agroecology movement. Green Revolution varieties are not higher yielding under the conditions of low capital availability and fragile ecosystems. Farmers’ varieties are not intrinsically low yielding, and Green Revolution varieties or industrial varieties are not intrinsically high yielding.

The measurement of yields and productivity in the Green Revolution as well as in the genetic engineering paradigm is divorced from seeing how the processes of increasing single-species, single-function output affect the processes that sustain conditions of agricultural production, both by reducing species and functional diversity of farming systems and by replacing internal inputs provided by biodiversity with hazardous agrochemicals. While these reductionist categories of yield and productivity allow a higher measurement of harvestable yields of single commodities, they exclude the measurement of the ecological destruction that affects future yields and the destruction of diverse outputs from biodiversity-rich systems.

Productivity in ecological farming practices is high if it is remembered that these practices are based on internal inputs, with very little external input required. While the Green Revolution has been projected as having increased productivity in the absolute sense, when resource utilization is taken into account, it has been found to be counterproductive and resource inefficient.

What does all this evidence mean in terms of “feeding the world”? It becomes clear that industrial breeding has actually reduced food security by destroying small farms and the small farmers’ capacity to produce these diverse outputs of nutritious crops. From the point of view of both food productivity and food entitlements, industrial agriculture is deficient compared to diversity-based internal input systems. Protecting small farms that conserve biodiversity is thus a food security imperative.

Data show that everywhere in the world, biodiverse small farms produce more agricultural output per unit area than large farms. Even in the United States, small farms of twenty-seven acres or fewer have ten times greater dollar output per acre than larger farms. It is therefore time to switch from measuring monoculture yields to assessing biodiversity outputs in farming systems.

Thus, both at the level of individual peasant farms and at the national level, the Green Revolution has led to a decline in food security. The same applies to the Gene Revolution. What the Green Revolution achieved was an increase in industrial inputs which, of course, created growth for the agrochemical and fossil fuel industries. But this increased consumption of toxins and energy by the agricultural sector did not translate into more food.

Today, most of the 1 billion people who lack adequate access to food are rural communities whose entitlements have collapsed, due either to environmental degradation or to livelihood destruction and negative terms of trade. Food security is therefore intimately connected to the livelihood security of small rural producers. There are proven alternatives to industrial agriculture and genetic engineering, and these are based on small farms and ecological methods. Sound resource use combined with social justice is the path of sustainability in agriculture that we should be taking.

The higher productivity of diversity-based systems indicates that there is an alternative to genetic engineering and industrial agriculture—an alternative that is more ecological and more equitable. This alternative is based on the intensification of biodiversity—intensifying through integrating diverse species—in place of chemical intensification, which promotes monocultures and, unlike its ecological alternative, fails to take all outputs of all species into account.

As Navdanya’s work on biodiversity-based organic farming shows, India could feed twice its population through biodiversity intensification.¹⁸ The U.N. report submitted to the General Assembly on December 20, 2010, also confirms that ecological agriculture produces more food: “Resource conserving, low-external-input techniques have a proven potential to significantly improve yields. Ecological interventions on 12.6 million farms increased crop yields of 79 percent.”¹⁹ A UNCTAD-UNEP study found that ecological methods increase crop yields by 116 percent for all of Africa and 128 percent in East Africa.²⁰

Shifts for the Transition to the New Paradigm

The main shifts needed for a transition to a new agriculture paradigm are the following:

1. A shift from a reductionist, mechanistic paradigm of agricultural education, research, and extension to the holistic paradigm of agroecology.

2. A shift from an agriculture based on a war paradigm to one based on peace.

3. A shift from agricultural subsidies to chemical inputs to support to promote organic farming through training and facilitating access to markets from local to international levels.

4. A shift from chemical intensification to ecological intensification through intensifying biodiversity. Chemical-intensive agricultures uses more land and more resources, while ecologically intensive agriculture produces more nutrition while using less resources.

5. A shift from a focus on monocultures for commodity production based on subsidized external inputs to a multifunctional agriculture whose aim is maintaining and enriching nature’s and people’s economies, protection of biological and cultural diversity, maintaining the well-being of rural communities, creation of rural livelihoods, and production of high-quality nutritious food.

6. A shift from the reductionist measure of “yield” of commodities to the holistic measure of biodiverse outputs and multifunctional benefits through “health per acre” and “wealth per acre.”

7. A shift from quantity to quality in measuring output of agriculture.

8. A shift from treating farmers and peasants as disposable and dispensable to recognizing their central role in maintaining ecosystems, cultures, and local economies. Farmers must be guaranteed respect, dignity, fair returns, and democratic participation.

A corporatized, industrialized, globalized farm system has given us hunger and malnutrition. We need to make a transition to people-centered, ecological, and decentralized food systems to address the deepening crisis of malnutrition and hunger. This transition involves radical changes in how food is produced and how it is distributed. A production system designed to end hunger and malnutrition has been put into practice on hundreds of thousands of farms.

As noted at the beginning of this essay, four hundred scientists who worked on the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology report Agriculture at the Crossroads, sponsored by UNDP, FAO, UNEP, UNESCO, the World Bank, WHO, and Global Environmental Facility, clearly stated, “Business as usual is no longer an option.” There needs to be a shift in the agricultural knowledge, science, and technology (AKST) paradigm from fragmented, component-based technologies to holistic, systems-based approaches. IAASTD moves away from single-commodity-based production systems to multifunctionality, which “recognizes the inescapable interconnectedness of agricultures’ different roles and functions. The concept of multi-functionality recognizes agriculture as a multi output activity producing not only commodities (food, feed, fibres, agrofuels, medicinal products and ornamentals) but also non-commodity outputs such as environmental services, landscape amenities and cultural heritages.” I would add to the definition of noncommodity output the biodiversity of nutritious foods produced for households and local economies.

The IAASTD recognizes that through an agroecological approach, “agro-ecosystems of even the poorest societies have the potential through ecological agriculture and IPM [integrated pest management] to meet or significantly exceed yields produced by conventional methods, reduce the demand for land conversion for agriculture, restore ecosystem services (particularly water) reduce the use of and need for synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, and the use of harsh insecticides and herbicides.”

Navdanya’s research and practice also shows that an ecological approach to agriculture delivers higher benefits in terms of food security than does industrial agriculture. Diversity goes hand in hand with decentralization. And the creation of decentralized biodiverse food systems is central to the design of a world without hunger. For this, a shift from globalization to localization is vital. Globalization has reduced food to a commodity while expanding the control of agribusiness over our food. Localization reclaims food as nourishment and expands community control over food systems.

Globalization	Localization
Agriculture and food systems shaped and controlled by corporations	Agriculture and food systems shaped and controlled by communities
Based on chemicals and GMOs, which bring profits for corporations	Based on biodiversity and agroecology, which bring benefits to ecosystems
Seed as intellectual property of corporations	Seed as common property of communities
Monocultures of a few commodities	Biodiversity of plants, animals, trees, soil organisms
Food as a commodity	Food as nourishment, food as a human right
Commodity speculation drives prices	Prices fixed by norms of justice and fairness
Hunger for 1 billion; food-related diseases for 2 billion	End of hunger and malnutrition—good food for all
Food dictatorship	Food democracy, food sovereignty

It is urgent that we design a transition from the globalization paradigm to a localization paradigm. This does not mean an end to international trade. But it does mean prioritizing the local. It means the decommodification of food, the reclamation of food as our being, our nourishment, our identity, our human right. It means freeing agriculture from WTO rules and governing it on the principles of food sovereignty. It means removing from our food system the gamblers who created “nuclear waste” and “toxic waste” on the balance sheets of investment firms before they bring down the food economy as they brought down the financial economy. It means stopping land grabs and the diversion of food for the poor to fuel for the cars of the rich. It means remembering that “everything is food” and “we are what we eat”—at the biological level, food justice is an ecological imperative. As biological beings, we all intrinsically have an equal share in the earth’s resources and in their potential to provide food for us all. Seed grabs, land grabs, and food grabs violate the very ethical and ecological design of our being human. Hunger by design is immoral, unjust, and nonsustainable. We are capable of making a transition to a better design that is ethical, just, and sustainable.

Food wars are destroying the planet, our farmers, and our health while denying billions their right to food. Food peace is achievable. It is imperative that we make peace with Mother Earth by protecting our soil, seeds, and biodiversity, our water and climate. Food peace is necessary to protect our small farmers and our health. Food peace can ensure the food rights of all. Let us put our collective creative energies toward designing a future of food that protects the planet and brings abundant and good food to the last child, the last woman, the last person, the last being.

Tagore invites us to return to the soil to make peace with the earth:

Let us all return to the soil
That lays the corners of its garments
And waits for us.
Life rears itself from her breast,
Flowers bloom from her smiles
Her call is the sweetest music;
Her lap stretches from one corner to the other,
She controls the strings of life.
Her warbling waters bring
The murmur of life from all eternity.

Notes

1. Vandana Shiva, “Science and Politics in the Green Revolution,” in The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics (London: Zed Books, 1991); Vandana Shiva, “Food and Water,” in Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2002).

2. Vandana Shiva, Soil, Not Oil: Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2008).

3. Why Is Every 4th Indian Hungry? (India: Navdanya, 2001).

4. Biodiversity Based Productivity: A New Paradigm for Food Security (India: Navdanya, 2009).

5. Babasaheb R. Sonawane, Chemical Contaminants in Human Milk: An Overview (Washington, DC: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1995).

6. K. Park, Park’s Textbook of Preventive and Social Medicine, 21st ed. (India: Banarsidas Bhano, 2011).

7. D. Heber, “Vegetables, Fruits, and Phytoestrogens in the Prevention of Diseases,” Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 50 (2004): 145–49.

8. Ibid.; “Health-Promoting Properties of Common Herbs,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 70, no. 3 (1999): 491S–9S; “Flavonoid Rich Fraction from Sageretia Theezans Leaves Scavenges Reactive Oxygen Radical Species and Increases the Resistance of Low Density Lipoproteins to Oxidation,” Journal of Medicinal Food 12, no. 6 (2009): 1310–15; Penny M. Kris-Etherton et al., “Bioactive Compounds in Foods: Their Role in the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease and Cancer,” American Journal of Medicine 113 (2002): 71S–88S; Rui Hai Liu, “Potential Synergy of Phytochemicals in Cancer Prevention: Mechanism of Action,” Journal of Nutrition 134, no. 12 (2004).

9. Liu, “Potential Synergy of Phytochemicals in Cancer Prevention”; Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations, Revision 2006—A Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee.

10. Kris-Etherton et al., “Bioactive Compounds in Foods”; Liu, “Potential Synergy of Phytochemicals in Cancer Prevention”; John W. Finley, “Proposed Criteria for Assessing the Efficacy of Cancer Reduction by Plant Foods Enriched in Carotenoids, Glucosinolates, Polyphenols and Selenocompounds,” Oxford Journals, Life Sciences, Annals of Botany 95, no. 7 (2005); Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations Revision 2006—A Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee.

11. Park, Park’s Textbook.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Virginia Worthington, “Nutritional Quality of Organic versus Conventional Fruits, Vegetables, and Grains,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 7, no. 2 (2001).

16. Biodiversity Based Productivity: A New Paradigm for Food Security (New Delhi: Navdanya, 2009).

17. Ibid.; Health per Acre (India: Navdanya, 2011).

18. Health per Acre.

19. Olivier de Schutter, report submitted to the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, December 2010, 8.

20. UNCTAD-UNEP, Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa (New York and Geneva: United Nations, 2008), 16.