Why we support Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Farming: a grassroots rebuttal by Nina López and Selma James
In June 2024, the Global Women’s Strike was invited to speak at two sessions on A Care Income to Protect the Land, the People and the Natural World at the International Degrowth Conference in Pontevedra. At the second session, Swati Renduchintala presented via zoom on Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) and the women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs) that spearhead it. In the discussion that followed, an Indian woman from the audience aggressively attacked APCNF referring to a critique we had never heard of. (A cog in the capitalist wheel: co-opting agroecology in South India)
We have since read this critique as well as a response to the critique from other academics rejecting what it was saying (Response to Ramdas and Pimbert paper[1].pdf). Our views on APCNF remain the same. Unlike those who wrote the critique, we did meet the women’s SHGs which are scaling up the agroecology the AP government is backing.
Background to our involvement with APCNF.
In 2021 the Global Women’s Strike (GWS) supported the farmers/farm workers movement against the Indian government’s three farm laws aimed at handing over agriculture to corporations. In the context of that movement, we looked to see if any of the farmers/farm workers were doing agroecology. Dean Kendall, a subsistence farmer from Payday, the men’s network which works closely with GWS, told us about the importance of agroecology not only for people’s health but for the climate. As we tried to understand more about how that worked, Dean came across APCNF and the women’s Self-Help Groups’ movement. We had several online meetings with and interviewed Mr Vijay Kumar, the head of Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (RySS), the Farmer Empower Organisation created by the State of Andhra Pradesh to implement APCNF, and Swati Renduchintala who works closely with him to manage national and international partnerships. We informed ourselves and asked many questions which they were entirely willing to answer. They encouraged us to come and see for ourselves, which we were keen to do.
In November 2022, GWS sent a delegation of four people, three women and one man, to Andhra Pradesh. They were: 1) our Indian point of reference who is based in rural Chhattisgarh and has been organising for decades with Dalit and Tribal women in over 500 villages against bonded labour, poverty and rape; 2) an Indian colleague who lives in the UK but goes back regularly and specialises in public health services in the Global South; 3) one of our UK members who has been our liaison person with India for decades; 4) the US subsistence farmer who first introduced us to agroecology.
Over the course of two weeks, our delegation met several women’s SHGs and their Federations, and visited several farms where women had adopted AP’s Natural Farming methods. They had every chance to ask any question they wanted in meetings and in one-to-one interviews with women farmers. They were extremely impressed with everything they saw and heard and the openness and willingness grassroots women and the APCNF team to explain what they were doing and how. They then spent another two weeks in Chhattisgarh. Our delegates have spoken publicly about their visit (see here).
Since then, the women in rural Chhattisgarh have been working with APCNF: three women farmers from Chhattisgarh visited APCNF, then APCNF sent two women champion farmers to five of their villages to show them their methods – they stayed for six weeks and have returned for another six. The women in Chhattisgarh have been eager to learn how to start kitchen gardens in their villages and whatever fields they have access to – it is a most fruitful and life-changing relationship.
After our month-long visit to AP and Chhattisgarh, we suggested to the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) that they invite Ms Renduchintala and a champion farmer, Meerabi Chunduru, to speak at their January 2024 conference. Jyoti Fernandes, the Land Workers Alliance campaigns co-ordinator who chaired the session, already knew the work of APCNF and Vijay Kumar. The two sessions we organised in 2023 and 2024 can be watched here and here.
On the basis of this experience, we comment on the critique which attacked APCNF.
1. The critique is not based on speaking to the women in AP’s Self-Help Groups and their experiences with APCNF. There is no mention of any of the positive impacts of APCNF: on how, for example, the SHGs have increased women’s power in their villages, the health of their children, their families and themselves, and their incomes. This seems to have been of little importance to the authors of the paper. However, we know from our visit that it has been of great importance to the women who practice natural farming because of its positive outcomes for their families and communities.
2. It makes no comparison between the SHGs in AP and those elsewhere and between those SHGs in AP where a majority of women practice natural farming and those that don’t. While there are SHGs all over India and there may be problems and/or corruption in some of them, there is no evidence of corruption in the SHGs that are part of APCNF. Quite the opposite: the women in APCNF, are increasingly in charge of what they grow and how, regardless of whether or not they own land.
3. It does not mention kitchen gardens, a focus of APCNF to enable landless families – Dalit and Tribal – to grow healthy food for themselves and not be dependent on the market or the credit from the banks for their nutrition. This is based on an extraordinarily intense and varied use of the limited land available to them. APCNF is criticised for not addressing the (caste and gender) hierarchy based on land ownership, but as far as we know it never claimed it would do so. What it does claim is to focus on ensuring everyone (families and communities) has access to the nutritious food they need, crucially starting with those at the bottom of the hierarchy.
4. It says nothing of the fact that APCNF is successful because it is based on women organised in SHGs and women have shown that they are more able than men to work collectively, share and compare what they learn, and prioritise the health and other needs of their family. The women SHGs have been key to RySS’s ability to introduce and scale up natural farming. This bypassing of women’s collective achievements is shocking. We have to remember that women are finding different ways of achieving various amounts of autonomy in their work and their community. We must acknowledge and support all the ways that women have found useful.
5. It makes no comparison between the health and income of the women farmers who are practicing APCNF versus those who have continued with conventional agriculture with chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Despite the terrible health damage caused by chemicals to the farmers/farm workers who handle them and to the soil, the critique implies that it is better for the men to spray chemicals because this is an easier job than for the women to be preparing natural inoculums as this is more labour intensive. But they didn’t ask the women which method they would prefer! It also shows ignorance of the APCNF method, as we saw men applying the bio-stimulants, including by spraying. (The women have brought many men around to APCNF methods, now that the benefits for all are undeniable.)
6. It doesn’t mention independent True Cost Accounting studies by the Global Alliance for The Future of Food published in 2023 which measure in a holistic way the benefits of APCNF to the community rather than only expense and output. Even if women’s work is so far not acknowledged as it must be, the women’s concerns have guided what is counted. (See here.)
- It shows no interest in how the method APCNF is implementing can help stop and even reverse climate change, and their efforts to scale up – APCNF is the biggest agroecology programme in the world and is working with farmers in 12 other states as well as other countries especially in the Global South, which recognise it offers a way to address multiple threats and push back against corporate takeover. Since the Pontevedra conference, APCNF has won the prestigious Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity in acknowledgement of its contribution and of putting women at the heart of change. (See here.)
Women farmers in AP are the best to judge whether APCNF is a benefit to them.
While we must expose corporate or other vested interests behind state/government programmes anywhere in the world, we must also acknowledge grassroots women’s efforts to get backing from the State, and those State officials who use their position to support women’s efforts rather than take over and exploit. The State and corporations are more able to exploit women and farmers generally when their production depends on buying expensive chemicals and terminator seeds, often leading to illness and indebtedness that have led many to suicide.
The women farmers in AP are the best to judge whether APCNF is a benefit to them, and whether their involvement in it has increased their power within the family and the community or not. The women champion farmers we met have become farmer scientists through their experimental hands-on work, the findings of which are shared far and wide. They do not consider themselves a mere “cog in the capitalist wheel”. But they are not academics writing papers, they are farmers working in the field. Listening to them and learning from what they have to teach is a better and more respectful starting point. That is what we aim to do.
Nina López and Selma James
GWS speakers at the International Degrowth Conference, June 2024
