The Auroville seed festival

“What is necessary for a seed to sprout and create more seeds?” asked Bernard of a group of students at the seminar on seed diversity at the Annual Seed Festival held last month. “Water”, “rain”, “sea”, “clouds”, “sun”, “wind”, “earth”, the responses came cascading in. “So, what do you hold when you hold a seed in your hand?”

There are two ways to look at a seed, he continued. The first is to cut it into pieces and put it under the microscope and study its cells, chromosomes and genes. “In this case I can name the genes,” he said, “but do I really understand the seed?” The second is to plant a seed and watch it grow into a tree. Then we see that when we hold a seed in our hands we hold the sun, the water and the earth and ourselves as co-creators in this process. This is to deeply understand the seed.

This beautiful reminder of the interrelatedness of everything in nature encapsulates, in essence, the message of the Annual Seed Festival held in Auroville last month: to safeguard the integrity and diversity of our ecosystems is to nourish our communities and strengthen our socio-economic fabric. Organised by the Sustainable Livelihood Institute (SLI), the Seed Festival aimed to create a platform to revive and strengthen the seed diversity in this region by enabling the sale and exchange of indigenous seeds between farmers.  

SLI’s festival is the latest addition to a growing network of seed festivals held across Tamil Nadu during the planting season of June and July. The first one, organised in 2006 by CREATE, a small group working on sustainable agriculture and consumer rights in Thiruvaroor district, involved farmers from ten neighbouring villages in efforts to save traditional varieties of paddy seeds. 

Since then seed festivals organised at the district level have become the most effective mechanism for reviving seed diversity in the southern states. Whereas earlier farmers used to save and share their seeds on a regular basis, in the last couple of decades they have come to depend almost wholly on hybrid seeds from seed companies for their requirements. This situation was caused by the government’s policies since the 1960s to promote high yielding varieties of crops with the single aim of increasing productivity. Over the years this has edged out traditional food varieties that had been developed by farmers for different localities and seasons. By the 1990s and early 2000s traditional seeds had almost disappeared from farmers’ fields in South India.

Traditional seed varieties, provided and carefully selected over the centuries by nature, are much more beneficial for the farmer and the ecosystem. They are hardy, pest-resistant, withstand unfavourable conditions in the area of their origin, and require less water and less nutritional inputs as compared with hybrid seeds. Intricately woven into the ecosystem and food culture of the region, the varieties of traditional staples and vegetables also provide a balanced and nutritional diet for humans. 

Hybrid seeds, on the other hand, often have high water and nutritional requirements and are more prone to pest attacks and diseases. Besides being costlier, they cannot be saved or shared with any benefit to the farmers. In fact, even where improved varieties are not hybrids, it is usually illegal for farmers to save or share such seeds. The use of hybrid seeds not only makes farmers dependent on external sources for the seeds themselves, it also increases his expenditure on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Needless to say, chemicals and monoculture have wreaked havoc on local ecosystems, depleting the nutritional value of the soil, ravaging intricately connected food chains and poisoning our food and water. In this context, the SLI’s festival is a much-needed platform for raising awareness about the urgency of returning to a more sustainable, ecological and farmer-centric paradigm for farming. 

As such, this second edition of the Annual Seed Festival was a resounding success. Of the 1000 plus visitors, most were farmers from Auroville and the surrounding region and several had stalls dedicated to the exchange and sale of traditional seeds and organic produce.

It was also the farmer community that was the focus of the lively and energised Seminar on Seed Diversity. The aim of the seminar was not only to raise awareness about the need to re-establish and maintain the seed diversity of the region. Activists, experienced practitioners and scientists also shared perspectives, practical tools and methodologies used in traditional farming that are all but lost today.

Dr. Sultan Ahemed Ismail, renowned soil biologist and ecologist, shared his views on farming practices and the role of farmers in promoting best practices in organic farming. He motivated farmers and students to think out of the box to find solutions to their problems instead of depending on established practices and the education system. 

Krishna Mckenzie, whose farm in Solitude is an expression of the philosophy of natural farming as taught by Matsuoka Fukuoaka, spoke of the soil’s health as the primary concern of the farmer. “The soil should be our priority; it is our only credit as farmers”, he said. In order to heal the soil, we require a shift in perspective. Instead of thinking about what we can get from the soil, we need to, like our ancestors, worship it. He suggested 3 steps: return all organic matter back to the soil to restore its nutritional value, honour the gifts of Mother Nature by eating the whole diversity of locally-grown food, and celebrate and honour the community through festivals and the arts. “Tamil culture has formed in direct relationship to the soil… When we value crops only for their economic worth, there is a cultural erosion.”

Mr. Pamayan, organic farming scientist, also described the deep connections between farming and culture in Tamil Nadu. In Tamil literature, for example, the landscape is divided into five distinct types, each of which has its unique farming models and tools. Crop patterns in each area are connected to soil, climate and water. The advent of monoculture erased traditional distinctions along with seed diversity, and replaced them with uniform, income-generating models.

Mr. Britto Raj, Agriculture Engineer from Dindigul, encouraged farmers to think of ways that would add value to their activity and help them gain additional income. Returning to integrated farming and growing new varieties of crops can assist both in the health of the ecosystem and management of costs in running a farm.

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The Sustainable Livelihood Institute which hosted the annual seed festival is an initiative created jointly by the Tamil Nadu Government and the Auroville Foundation and is designed to develop and build capacities for sustainable livelihood solutions directed towards rural communities in the state. The Institute has also been working to ensure that conservation-linked livelihood initiatives and sustainable projects are integrated into government schemes.

Since its inception in 2015, SLI has trained over 3000 rural community members from across Tamil Nadu and more than 400 rural development government officials. In a context where “governments everywhere are under enormous pressure to compromise on ecological prerogatives and diversity”, said Dr. Rama Subramanian, the Director,  in his welcome speech, “It has taken much courage and conviction of a few dedicated government officials to create and sustain SLI”.