The tangled web of cashew growing and pesticide spraying

It’s that time of year again. Aurovilian eyes are burning, heads are aching, throats and noses are sore, and so many of us feel exhausted and nauseous. Yes, it’s cashew spraying season again. And it is not a minor problem in Auroville, according to fresh data from the newly-formed Auroville initiative Healthy Cashew Network. The Network’s community-wide 2018 health survey indicates that 42 per cent of respondents suffered headaches in last year’s cashew season, 25 percent experienced sore throats, and about 20 percent suffered from itchy eyes, nausea and vomiting. Coughs, breathing problems and fever were all experienced. In summary, only seven per cent of 350 people surveyed said that they felt no symptoms at all.

Network member Marc was inspired to join the group when he was forced to move from his home in New Creation due to the pesticide spraying. “One morning I smelled something really strange, and it was really hurting my throat. We all had headaches. After talking to people, we realised what was going on.” Marc shifted his family first to Quiet, and then to a house-sit in Grace, but it did not turn out to be the reprieve he’d hoped. “I thought, ‘Now I’m going to be in Auroville and will be saved from that pestilence’, but it was almost worse. The community is surrounded by cashew fields, some of them Auroville-owned, that are still being sprayed with pesticide.”

Marc’s house shifting experience is not unique. 11 percent of surveyed community members said they left their homes in order to get away from cashew pesticide spraying last year. And even more significantly, more than 30 percent of respondents said they wished to leave their homes, but could not because of various factors.

But Aurovilians’ desire to drive down pesticide use comes up against a complicated nexus of local practices, stakeholders and larger forces. And if this story has a ring of déjà vu about it, your instincts are right. Auroville Today has covered the issue of toxic pesticide spraying in various articles over the last 25 years. Is cashew spraying a case of Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? No, say some. The situation is worse now.

Rita, whose late husband Njal worked tirelessly to promote organic neem pesticide to local farmers between 2000-2012, points out that she and Njal also did a health survey about a decade ago. “The health effects are so much worse now,” she says. “The symptoms are worse. The number of people saying they’re affected has definitely gone up. And the chemicals used are much worse. In Njal’s time, it was mostly Endosulfan being used on cashews. Endosulfan has a yellow label, which is bad enough. The pesticides they use now have red labels [the most poisonous]. The farmers now make a concoction by mixing up different pesticides.”

Endosulfan continues to be one of the pesticides of choice for cashew cultivators in the Auroville area, even though it has been banned in more than 81 countries around the world. The toxic pesticide has also been banned in the neighbouring Indian states of Kerala and Karnataka, after it was linked to high rates of mental disorders, physical deformities and cancer in certain rural areas. Yet, farmers in Kerala continue to cross the state border to buy Endosulfan in Tamil Nadu, where it is still legal, and take it back to Kerala in bottles with fake labels. A ban on Endosulfan in Tamil Nadu is rumoured to be in the wind, yet the legal-regulatory process is slow and usually allows for a five-to-ten year phasing-out process. “Last year was extreme, far more than usual,” says Network member Jasmin, about the use of Endosulfan in 2018’s cashew season. “We heard an unconfirmed rumour that because it’s going to be banned, the dealers dumped a lot of pesticide on the market.”

Cashew plots and spraying

Why have cashews become such a popular local cash crop? Until 30 years ago, local farmers generally grew groundnuts and pulses on their family plots. The local landowners embraced cashew trees when they found they were much less labour-intensive than traditional crops, and were well suited to the red laterite soil of Auroville’s region. The crop also did not attract animals to destroy it, and it commanded cash value. Over time, more and more local landowners converted their land to the comparatively low-maintenance cashew crops, and something of a local monoculture has resulted.

As Auroville has bought up land over the decades, much of this has been land containing established cashew trees. The Auroville-owned cashew plots in the Greenbelt are generally stewarded by Aurovilian foresters. Stewards may choose to plant forest and give less priority to cashews, which has taken place in areas such as Pitchandikulam.

The 30 Auroville-owned cashew plots in the city area and outlying lands are managed by the Land Board. They consist of 1100 trees across 150 acres. For a number of years, the Board has leased out these cashew plots to local cashew cultivators in a tender process. The system was updated last year, whereby the first tendering round is announced on Auronet and is open to Aurovilians only. Bidders offer a certain amount for the lease on the plot, depending on the number of trees and the Land Board’s estimate of the worth of the lease. Any remaining plot leases that are not taken up by Aurovilians are then offered to non-Aurovilians in a second tendering round. Last year, 17 people took up the 30 cashew contracts, and 87 percent of these were Aurovilians. Each year, the number of leases available decreases, due to the development of Auroville’s city on former cashew land.

Murugan, who has been working at the Land Board for 30 years, clarifies that people leasing Auroville cashew plots are told they cannot spray pesticides, and the lease clearly states that chemicals cannot be used. The Land Board, however, does not have the resources to monitor spraying on Auroville land. He refers to a “problem” on an Auroville cashew plot some years earlier. “We got some complaints [about pesticide spraying]. That’s why we changed the system. That’s why we give priority to Aurovilians now. If we tell them [not to spray], they mostly don’t do it.” Murugan explains the villagers’ preference for spraying pesticide as being shaped by a belief that they will get more cashews when harvesting. “They say they will get 100kg without spraying, but with pesticide, they get 150-200 kg.”

While the Auroville-owned cashew plots can be subjected to measures to protect them from pesticide spraying, about 10 per cent of the land within Auroville’s city area is not owned by Auroville. Most of this non-Auroville-owned land contains cashew trees that are harvested each year. There are also many cashew plots in the Greenbelt that are not owned by Auroville. Many Aurovilians believe that the use of pesticides is rampant on these non-Auroville owned plots, and some believe that pesticides are also sometimes sprayed on the Auroville Land Board-leased plots too. As Rita points out, it can be difficult to tell where pesticide clouds are coming from, and to know which plot is being sprayed. “It’s one person’s word against another’s. No one really knows.”

The Healthy Cashew Network has set up a What’sApp group to notify concerned people of spraying on plots in and around Auroville. It relies on group members to report any sightings of cashew spraying. “If someone notices that spraying is going on, people who are sensitive can know to choose another route or wear a mask,” says Patricia from the Network. These alerts are transferred onto a map which can be accessed online. Aurovilians are also encouraged to share photos of evidence of spraying.

The Network last year managed to collect pesticide samples and information from various sources in Auroville and neighbouring villages. With the help of the Environmental Monitoring Service in Auroville, the Network has compiled a ‘rough guide’ to the 14 most commonly used agricultural pesticides in the Auroville area. The majority of the pesticides used locally are classified as ‘very toxic’ or ‘extremely hazardous’, and many of them are used in suicides. The acute symptoms of toxicity of these pesticides are well documented globally, and include nausea, breathing difficulties, cramps, diarrhea, blurred vision, burning and seizures. The chronic effects of long-term exposure include endocrine disruption and birth defects, and most of the pesticides have been linked to cancer. These effects are a major motivating factor behind the Healthy Cashew Network’s goals of creating awareness and reducing spraying on Auroville land.

Pesticide spraying

While many Aurovilians believe the main perpetrators of spraying are people on the village-owned plots within the Auroville master plan area, not all village-owned cashew plots use pesticides. Some village-owned cashew plots within the Master Plan have converted to organic methods, due to their exposure to Auroville and the educational efforts of Dr Lucas and Njal over the last two or three decades. Ayyanar, Murugan’s colleague at the Land Board, is one of the many Tamil Aurovilians whose family has long owned a plot of land inside Auroville’s Master Plan area. Like many villagers at the time, his father farmed ground nuts and lentils on the plot when Ayyanar was a child. About 25 years ago, when Ayyanar was a teenager, the family planted cashews. “When I was staying in the village, I didn’t realise these things [the dangers of pesticide spraying]. I think in about 2000, I sprayed twice with pesticide. After I got knowledge from Auroville that this is not good, I stopped it. I got information from News and Notes, and also from the man near Solar Kitchen [Njal]. After that I didn’t put pesticide, not even neem oil. Now I feel my nose hurting during harvest time [from other people spraying].”

There are other Tamil Aurovilians like Ayyanar who no longer use pesticides on their family-owned cashew plots. Rita points to a number of local farmers who converted to neem oil thanks to her late husband Njal’s educational campaign and his trial plot near Solar Kitchen that demonstrated that farmers did not make a loss by using neem oil. “Quite a few farmers bought the neem oil,” says Rita. “We sold 200-300 litres, maybe even more. So it’s that much less chemical pesticide in the atmosphere.” Rita was unable to continue Njal’s work after his death in 2012, and no one else has taken up the task. “I did ask FoodLink to take it over, but everyone was too busy to actively promote it. But if the neem oil is not available for farmers, what will they do?”

Ayyanar explains villagers’ rationale for spraying. “Villagers do not understand the health advantages if they do not spray, and how it affects the air. Mostly they feel they get more money from spraying.” However, Ayyanar claims that whether plots are sprayed with pesticide or not, they yield roughly the same amount of cashews and income – this is borne out by his own plot. “People don’t really calculate whether they get less or more. It’s just become a habit now. If you consider the costs of spraying, picking labour, water, bullock cart... it’s about the same in the end.” Harvesters like Ayyanar who do not use pesticides can sell their pesticide-free cashews for an extra Rs20 per kg (Rs150 per kg, compared to the rate of Rs.110-130 for pesticide-sprayed cashews). Yet the extra income for pesticide-free cashews does not appear to be a sufficient incentive for village cultivators to give up pesticides.

Ayyanar highlights the various ways in which pesticides are pushed towards farmers. When villagers visit the regional government Agricultural Society, they are sold pesticides at a 20-30 per cent discount, and the government may even give farmers loans to buy pesticides. Private agents also visit villages to sell pesticides, and radio advertisements extol their benefits. Banks often will refuse loans to farmers unless they agree to use pesticide on their crops. Jasmin from the Healthy Cashew Network labels this multi-pronged lobbying of farmers as “a big collective brainwash”.

Priya, the farmer-founder of Auroville’s Buddha Garden and also a Network member, largely agrees. She links the problem to the short-term thinking of everyone involved in the cashew growing and picking process. “So often it seems to me that people want to extract the maximum amount of money with the minimum amount of fuss from the land,” she says. “Cashew trees don’t need a lot of looking after, don’t need extra water, and you don’t even need a fence because cows and goats won’t eat them. Often the people who own the trees don’t have the time or inclination to do the picking. It’s easier to sell the contract to someone else who will be happy to do that. Both groups of people want to get as much money as they can from the next harvest rather than worry about the long-term. This is understandable when people have school fees to pay. And the people doing the picking are told by the government, someone powerful, through regular radio ads, “Now is the time to be spraying your cashews!” It’s not surprising they become too scared not to spray in case they get a bad harvest and lose money. Especially as the tree owner is unlikely to have much sympathy for them.” Priya says that if the pickers get sick as a result of spraying, they may perceive their ill health as transient and as a reasonable trade-off for the money.

Rita also points to the complexities of the pesticide-awareness work she and Njal undertook amongst local land owners and cultivators. “We saw how strong these lobbies are,” she says. “One question that cashew cultivators often asked us was, ‘If the pesticides are bad, why is the government giving subsidies on them?’ Some people who worked in pesticide companies told us they had been made sick by pesticides. But they said, ‘What else can we do? We need to do this work in order to earn our living.’ This mentality is linked to poverty and miseducation.”

These practices and beliefs play into the drawbacks of monocultures – cashews having become, to a great extent, a monoculture in and around Auroville. Due to the lack of biological diversity, monocropping can create the spread of pests and diseases, which farmers then feel compelled to treat with pesticide. Pesticides kill off more than just unwanted insects, they can also kill off vital pollinators. Monocultures also deplete soil health, forcing farmers to use chemical fertilisers to encourage growth and production, which depletes the soil further. These pesticides and fertilisers make their way into groundwater sources and the air, creating further pollution and further affecting insects, animals and human life.

Yet Priya, who has cashew trees at her Buddha Garden farm, claims that the risk of pests destroying fields of cashew crops might be overstated in the local area. She does not use any kind of spray, and instead relies on planting other trees amongst the cashew trees; crop rotation; and creating a diversity of bacteria in the soil and in insect life. She points to a university student’s study on her farm. “She did a very elegant study and found there were far fewer pests when there were more species of insects. The more diversity, the fewer pests.” Priya also says that her experience when bugs do arrive in the cashew orchard, is that they confine themselves to one tree. “We find the following year, the harvest on that particular tree is often very good. In that process, the tree builds up immunity and is less likely to get bugs again.

Cashew cultivation – viable models?

Some Aurovilians have started to take matters into their own hands in order to minimize spraying. A few who live next door to locally-owned cashew plots make private arrangements with the plot owners to buy the entire harvested crop, on condition that the owner does not use pesticide. These Aurovilians may sell the cashews at a loss, but they see this as a way to avoid the toxic health effects of pesticides.

The Healthy Cashew Network proposes another model for Auroville communities. They encourage communities to collectively take up a cashew lease from the Land Board for a neighbouring cashew plot, and for the community to harvest the cashews themselves. Rama Narayana and Anandi, who are members of the Network, highlight the experiences of their own communities. Rama Narayana’s community of Courage collectively took the lease of the neighbouring cashew plot in 2005, after many community members suffered ill health that they connected to pesticide spraying. “People had to leave the house for one or two months, and look for another place,” says Rama Narayana. “It’s a concern, not to live in one’s own house. Children suffer more, it’s unbearable for them.”

After the Courage community demonstrated its capacity to care for the cashew plot over the first two years, it was then permitted to integrate it into their community park, and they no longer pay for the lease. The cashew field now has walkways for adults and children to enjoy, and the community’s wastewater treatment flow goes into the field. In order to cultivate diversity, other fruit trees, flowers and vegetables are grown there. The Courage cashew plot is maintained by the community’s gardener supervised by the community, and one extra person is employed for a couple of months during harvest time. Most of the cashews are sold to a processing unit, and the money goes towards the garden’s maintenance. “It’s not much profit, but we don’t calculate in that way,” says Rama Narayana. “If nature gives us fruits, we should take care of its trees. We consider it to be part of our community life. It should be a model! Auroville should be self-sustaining! Since taking the lease, we have no complaints about people suffering from pesticides.”

While Courage is a large community with the resources and full-time staff to manage the cashew field with relative ease, what are the possibilities for smaller communities that live near cashew plots? Anandi lives in the small community of Kriya which has 20 cashew trees. When the Kriya community observed the apples reddening and falling in harvest time last year, they decided to take responsibility for harvesting themselves. In the peak season of April and May, about ten community members harvested cashews early every morning, and then separated the apples from the cashew nuts and washed, dried and stored them. The community sold most of the harvested cashews to processing units in Auroville, and will use the small profits to buy gardening tools. Some cashews were set aside for community use, and resulted in Anandi’s delicious cashew balls that have delighted Aurovilian taste buds at community events in the post-harvest months.

Anandi says the challenges of getting the community to join in with the harvest all boil down to attitude. “Some Aurovilians don’t want to do hard work for a tiny financial reward, or do work they see as being low status,” she says. There is also the problem that many Aurovilians leave Auroville in the height of summer, when the cashew harvesting season is at its peak. “The harvest all comes down to a few individuals who are dedicated and can organise other people to help them with it,” says Anandi. While Priya points to the difficulties of getting Aurovilians to commit to the “hot sticky work” of harvesting for the whole season, she emphasises that the community model can be strong when it is led by young people like Anandi who have the energy for coordination.

Jasmin summarises the model the Network proposes, saying, “The idea is that Auroville takes care of its own cashew fields and that they don’t need to get leased out. In the meantime, one of the first goals of the Healthy Cashew Network is to avoid pesticides being sprayed on Auroville land. Some people tell us that, ‘It’s all about attitude – the more you think of pesticides, the more you get sick’. If I was a yogi, I could possibly protect myself energetically, but it doesn’t change the fact that the earth is getting poisoned and species are disappearing. So it’s an urgent call to action.”

Cashew processing – viable models?

Some people refer to cashews as “gold” – a precious asset that always increases in value – and allude to the “commerce” that lies behind them, which is sometimes murky. But in conversation with cashew cultivators and processors in Auroville, it seems that the profits, at least for small-scale cultivators, are tiny in reality.

For Priya, cashews are a very small Buddha Garden sideline that doesn’t translate into any sort of viable business model. She and her farm team do all the picking of the farm’s cashew trees themselves. “We don’t have enough cashews of our own to process,” she says. “We don’t want to process them ourselves, or to buy stuff from outside. It’s too much hassle, and knowing whether it’s really organic or not is very difficult.” The nuts are then taken to a processing place outside Auroville that does small batch production without machines, and where Priya’s pesticide-free cashews are processed separately from other cashews. Priya then generally sells them through FoodLink, Auroville’s own farm-grown food distribution system. “We don’t make much money out of them but that’s not what we aim to do. They are part of the mixed farming model that we have in Buddha Garden.” For Priya, the cashew trees are an important educational tool, and she plans to make a video showing people how to care for and pick cashews.

Steffen was inspired to take up pesticide-free cashews from Auroville and sell them under his Joyoo Foods label, in order to drive down the amount of land in Auroville sprayed with pesticides. He oversees the processing of cashews from a few cultivators inside Auroville, but says he cannot manage to scale up beyond about 1500-2000 kgs per year due to the expense. “I don’t have much storage space. The workers are getting more expensive. We process manually, and I’m not interested in doing it in an industrial way. Cashews are now about Rs200 [per 100g] in the shop, and the price is rising. So it’s a niche market.” Steffen prefers manual processing, claiming it produces a higher quality than other cashews that are steamed and then shelled in cutting machines – the process used by the large industrial-scale players. But processing in a dry way, as he does, also means that more nuts break. Broken nuts have less value, which becomes another challenge to being profitable.

Steffen points out that the cheaper cashews currently flooding the Indian market come from Africa and other states in India, and these are harvested before the nut has fully matured. He also claims that impoverished people are exploited in outside processing units because they are willing to work for “any price.” In contrast, he tries to pay his workers fair wages, sick pay, health insurance and pension fund, which he asserts is important for employment in Auroville. But he struggles to make the cashew part of his business profitable. “The profit margin is small on cashews,” he says. “Cashews you either do for love, or you do on a big, big scale, where you can get some margin. Manual cashew processing is also very work-intensive. You need to take care of workers, and you need a proper setup for storage and processing, with additional costs for the food license, health checkup for workers, etcetera. Cashews have a five per cent tax if they are unroasted, and 12 per cent if they are roasted. In addition, there’s the shop margin, usually between 25-30%. And suddenly, a packet of cashews costs more than Rs200, and then you feel ashamed to put this price on your label! But it’s like this.”

When Steffen and Priya describe the tight economics of being a small-scale cashew unit, it is hard to see how cashew processing and selling can be made viable as a business model, unless the business is very large scale. Within the small-scale operations in the Auroville area, the only person who clearly comes out ahead at the end of the season is the plot owner, who gains a flat fee each year for the privilege of having someone else harvest his cashew trees. He also largely avoids the toxic effects of spraying, while the people doing the harvesting suffer the most.

As for suggestions that Auroville could start its own cashew co-op, in which it could control more aspects of the production chain – such as plots, spraying, cultivation, processing and sales Steffen’s view is shaped by the need for a huge infrastructure. “It won’t work unless someone donates a big sum of money to create a large building to store cashews, huge platforms for drying the cashews after harvest, and to pay watchmen and other staff. Instead, I think it should be done in a decentralised way. The Aurovilians who live next to outside-owned cashew fields can take the lease, arrange the workers for harvesting, and arrange security so that people don’t steal the cashews. After harvest, the community can decide to either sell the cashews, or to get them processed through hired workers or through one of the Auroville cashew processors. The money or the processed cashews would then stay in the community. Auroville could start with a few fields, and show that it can be done, and each year add some more fields. And after some years, we might be able to show that we have avoided a good part of the spraying.”

While the ban of Endosulfan in Tamil Nadu is in the wind, Jasmin from the Healthy Cashew Network cautions that this alone won’t solve the problem. “Even if you ban one notorious pesticide, there are several others that are just as toxic,” she says. “Endosulfan has a nasty smell, but now there are some pesticides in use that are odorless, so people will not be alerted by the smell, and can suddenly get sick. What is needed is a change of consciousness. Unfortunately this often only happens after facing serious health issues in one’s family.” Anandi points to the way in which China has shifted to solar power after top government officials’ families were affected by smog and died. “But is that sustainable change?”, she ponders. “We can’t do it on big scale like in China, but we can do small things in the right spirit, and be a catalyst for a real change of consciousness.”

In the meantime, the pesticide spraying season is gearing up in and around Auroville. Aurovilians are confining themselves indoors or donning masks. They’re heading to the Integral Health Clinic to store up on the homeopathic remedy Okoubaka. They’re signing up to the WhatsApp spray alert system, and taking circuitous routes to avoid spray clouds. Clearly, this is not a sustainable model. But the initiatives of those Aurovilians taking responsibility for looking after Auroville’s cashews may hold hope for a way forward.