Seed Saving Tour of India

01 August 2002
Jude Fanton went to India for three and a half weeks to give a workshop for GREEN Foundation in Bangalore and to visit other projects that do similar work to Seed Savers' Network.

Exclusion cage to prevent insects cross-pollinating varieties, made from mosquito net

KARNATAKA - BANGALORE

The workshop assessed the challenges, pitfalls and opportunities in seed saving of local varieties of vegetable and other useful crops in South India.

The main host organisation was GREEN Foundation. Vanaja Ramprasad, its founder and director, had come to Australia to speak at Seed Savers' Annual Conference last November and to visit the Seed Centre in Byron Bay. The Foundation was established nine years ago to promote sustainable practices in genetic resources, ecology, energy and nutrition. Its work has included the conservation of traditional varieties of paddy rice and various millets with a thousand local marginal farmers.

Before the workshop we visited GREEN Foundation's two acre Biodiversity Conservation Centre one and a half hours from Bangalore in Thally just into Tamil Nadu where former Seed Savers' intern, Amber Tucker was working as a volunteer. It was intensively planted with fruit trees, legume trees and vegetables.

WORKSHOP REPORT

Conserving Seed Diversity for Domestic Food Security, 18-22 June 2001, Bangalore, organised by GREEN Foundation and Seed Savers' Network and sponsored by PSMU.

PARTICIPANTS AND THEIR RESPONSE

The workshop was attended by eighteen people from five states. Five of them were directors of NGOs, seven were from middle management level and the rest were field workers. One's impressions are coloured by how well any representative of an organisation speaks English (my knowledge of the other five languages spoken at the workshop was confined to familiarity with a list that a current intern had compiled on fifty vegetables, fibre and oilseed plants, their names in the languages of India and their usage).

Three of the organisations have worked almost exclusively on biodiversity issues and grass roots conservation. One representative had been working in sustainable agriculture and watershed NGOs and had just started up an organisation himself to conserve agricultural biodiversity.

Towards the end there was time to plan with the other organisations to collaborate on the issues and the practical conservation measures. The last half day was dedicated to forming a South Indian Seed Network with a steering group of seven of the most committed people there. They were meeting at length, speaking Hindi and making plans to swap seed lists, publications and workshop events. I gained the impression that they were strongly motivated through meeting one another over the week, with the agenda of conserving domestic food security crops.

PROFILE OF SOME OF THE NGOS ATTENDING

All the participants at the workshop were from organisations that have seed saving programmes. Generally these had a strong focus on cereal and pulse crops. Some of the organisations have also undertaken medicinal and forest biodiversity conservation measures. There is a massive popular interest and engagement with Ayurvedic medicine which utilises 8 000 plants, and a huge body of knowledge that is well preserved.

• Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Madras and further south in Tamil Nadu has maintained varieties of paddy rice, other cereals and vegetables for several years.

• RASTA, Wainad District, Kerala helps out the poorest and conserves agricultural biodiversity.

• Venture Trust, Tamil Nadu, which is part of LEISA Network has a biodiveristy register, campaigns about patenting, has had an exposure trip to other groups to learn about agricultural biodiversity issues and grass roots solutions and produces a newsletter and submits articles to international publications.

• One woman in a Women's self-help network saw that her organisation could and should be working with women on saving the seeds of their garden plants in order to have greater food security. She was intending to apply the strategies we discussed in her organisation's programmes for the urban poor in Karnataka State