Speech on the occasion of 'Annam - National Food and Agro Biodiversity Festival at Kozhikode on 11th February 2010

Ladies and Gentlemen,


It is a matter of great pleasure for me to be present on the occasion of the launch of second National Food and Agro-biodiversity Festival organised by Annam, a people’s movement that preaches good food, good health and food sovereignty. I appreciate the Good Food Movement launched in India in 2008. Such movements create the much needed awareness about the linkages between good food, local agro-biodiversity and health.

Mother Nature has provided us with about 300,000 - 400,000 plant species, of which about ten percent (i.e. 30,000) are edible and an estimated 7,000 species have been cultivated or collected by humans for food or other agricultural purposes. However, today there are only 30 species of all these crops, that “feed the world” by providing 95% of dietary energy or protein; and only three crops, namely, rice (26%), wheat (23%) and maize (7%) together account for over 50% of the global food energy. The dependence on a limited number of crops entails a reduction of options for ensuring more diverse nutrition, enhancing food production, raising incomes, coping with environmental constraints and managing ecosystems.

As against this, the fundamental feature of traditional farming systems around the world has been diversity in varieties, breeds and species. Even today, communities and farmers continue to play a very critical role in development and evolution of crop varieties. Community knowledge is the essence of social capital of the poor, which is constantly evolving, as individual and communities usually have multiple interests or concerns, and are confronted with numerous challenges of sustenance.

The farmers depend largely on the availability of genetic diversity for food security and self-sufficiency, particularly in the marginal areas. They often cultivate several crop varieties in one season, which enables them to adopt crops suited to their farm environment and cultural crop production practices. The wider environmental adaptability of diverse crops and varieties also provides the farmer with a capacity to avert risk.

The cultural value of agro-biodiversity also gives us another reason for developing appropriate strategies for their conservation. Therefore, it is important to build on indigenous knowledge on which resource-poor farmers including tribes have conserved many crops and species of ethno-botanical importance. Their knowledge is important, it being based on years of informal experimentation and understanding of a particular production system.

In a study, it has been found that the women and men of the Paniya Tribe of Kerala, mainly seen in the Wayanad District, have the knowledge of about 265 distinct kinds of wild plants and animals with food and nutritional value, which they collect on diverse landscapes as vayal (paddy fields) and associated areas like kolli (marshy areas), vazhiyariku (waysides), thottam (plantations) and kadu (forest). They use many wild food species, especially leafy vegetables - for food, medicinal uses and for ritual purposes among others. Both Paniya men and women are generally knowledgeable of 30 documented multiple uses of wild food species. However, when an exercise was carried out to study the continuance of the knowledge over generations, it was observed that a decline in traditional knowledge has occurred, more so in the present generations.

Since rapid changes in the way of life of local communities has led to consequent loss of community knowledge that can play an important role in enhancing development, it is pertinent that developmental workers in both governmental and non-governmental organizations incorporate these aspects in the process of sustainable development.

We also need to simultaneously realise that the quest for increasing food production to meet burgeoning demand has led to the development of modern cultivars and other technologies, and their spread has been dramatic, more rapid than anything that ever happened in agriculture before. The ensuing success, obviously also resulted in replacement of traditional varieties, landraces and practices. The challenge, therefore, is to simultaneously cater to the requirements of traditional methods of living alongside better agricultural quality and yields for better and improved human living.

I am sure the Food and Agro-biodiversity Festival has considered to evenly balance the two dimensions. With these words, I wish the organizers a great success in the events planned over the next four days.

Jai Hind !