Farmer Friend Award Acceptance Note
Isola Del Piano, 19 September 2015

Dear Fellow travellers in the quest for a sustainable future, I see in the decision of the Girolomoni Co operative and Foundation, to confer me the Farmer Friend award, an act of defiance. We live in times when mega narratives rule our imagination. Of course, the problems that confront humanity are huge and appear to be larger than life. And in the poverty of our imaginations we often tend to think that the solutions too need to be massive, larger than life and therefore difficult to achieve. It almost affords us the luxury of not really doing much about it: what difference can small acts make against the magnitude of the problems we are confronted with? Against that mindset, recognising the significance of a few thousand farmers in a remote corner of the world, involved in sensitive farming practices and responsible stewardship of the soil is surely an act of defiance. It is putting its bet on little women and men and their small stories of endurance, hope and survival and not on the mega narratives of salvation by towering personalities and messiahs.

It is an act of defiance on another count as well: in an age and time when economic progress is believed to hinge only in a competitive framework, where only someone’s loss is seen as another’s gain, this award, in more ways than one, asserts that we can actually cooperate and not necessarily always compete for success. Against the corporatisation of the world, this award upholds cooperation. Against the almost fatalistic belief that free enterprise has only one relevant and worthwhile expression, which is corporate accumulation and expansion, it upholds the values and myriad practices of a sharing economy and of solidarity trade. And amidst the giant roar of corporatisation, in to which unfortunately much of our cooperatives themselves are mindlessly federating themselves, this award recognises the echo of its own tiny bird song of co-operation in a distant land.

Friends, I am truly humbled that you have made me, as the representative of a value based business – Elements and a small farmer organisation committed to justice in trade – Fair Trade Alliance Kerala, an accomplice in this defiance. Thank you.

I have been requested to engage with the theme of bio diversity in my sharing with you today. But I am going to disappoint many of the nature enthusiasts amongst you by discussing as much about the dire need for diversity in the man made world of economics and enterprise as about the bio diversity of the natural world. For it is my firm belief that monocultures of the farms and forests is most predominantly preceded by the monoculture of the economic order and of human enterprise. And conversely, our efforts to preserve bio diversity in the natural world and crop diversity in our farmlands can scarce succeed if we, as I indicated earlier, almost fatalistically, concede that profit has to be the preeminent motive of economic activity and the spirit of human enterprise can find expression only in a competitive frame work that sets humans against humans. Humans against nature is then just a small step away.

And then there is the monoculture of ideas. And against the topic of our discussion today particularly, the monoculture of ideas regarding material progress, growth and development. This idea posits progress as linear and unending and development as the path of redemption from poverty and depravation of what are considered ‘the good things in life’. There is no religion as universal as this; its believers are not affected by their differing views on individualism or collectivism, racial tolerance or intolerance, xenophobic nationalism or universal brother and sisterhood. Development is the super religion of the modern age and unless we draw the courage to call it exactly what it is – superstition, there is little scope for saving a planet in peril or preserving its bio diversity. This organised, institutionalised religion demands an urgent increase in the number of heretics. It is time to rebuild the Babel tower once again – where we speak many languages of human progress, celebrate many ways of finding human happiness and demolish the singular god of development with a new age environmental paganism.

The Girolomoni Co operative and Foundation in some ways to me is that species in the bio diversity of our economic and social institutions that is threatened with extinction, but refuses to die. But it is to such species that humanity will increasingly turn to in times of crisis. The economically high yielding varieties of organisations and businesses have inherent genetic deformities. Exactly like the GMOs. They consume huge amount of resources, they are invasive species that respect neither cultural specificity nor regional distinctiveness. They do not even get their legitimacy from addressing any human need. In fact, they create the humans who are automated to need what they produce. Thus they create this universal consumer: five feet five inch tall, jeans clad, cola sipping, burger munching and now increasingly confined to his cell, err…. I mean cell phone.

But make no mistake, the crisis humanity faces is both structural, and even more significantly, civilisational. And when the world wants to turn to pure, robust strains of economic and social organisations that can help us survive this civilisational crisis we are confronted with; that can help us get back to robust organisational breeds suited to the intrinsic human qualities of justice, co operation and collective survival of humanity as a whole; it will turn to entities like the Girolomoni, to study and understand its DNA, its genetic code and then retrieve such strains to rebuild afresh new communities, new businesses, new ways of creating economic and cultural values and ensuring our collective survival. Prophets like Gino will always be seen in their times to be loners in the wilderness. The enduring legacy they leave behind will remain as the social, cultural and ecological capital of humanity as a whole.

I come from the South Indian state of Kerala. Yes, Vasco da Gama of Portugal landed on our shores, in fact, on the shores of the very town I presently live, over 500 years ago and heralded the advent of colonialism. He came in search of spices, particularly Malabar pepper. But leave alone in the 15th century, as late as during the initial decades of the 20th century, the Malabar region of India, did not cultivate pepper. Our predecessors collected and gathered pepper. Pepper vines thrived in the homestead farms of the Malabar region along with probably a hundred other crops, which had nutritional, therapeutic, and nutraceutical values. A homestead farm in Kerala was a veritable forest farm. It would appear disorganised, not favouring assembly line economies of scale and production and not amenable to organised and efficient methods of manuring, irrigation and harvesting. The fact is, it was actually a nuanced, evolved and intricately engineered system whose nerve center was the family kitchen. And the matriarch, the woman, was the dominant decision maker as to what grew, what was for own consumption, what was to be stored for the rainy days, what was to be shared with neighbours, what was to be fed to animals and what if any remained, the men could take to the market and earn cash returns. This farm forest, this treasure trove of bio diversity, this reservoir of food security is what characterised farming in the region I come from, but is now a thing of the past.

The spoiler: the market! In fact, modern market, as we know it today. Which needed quality and quantity not dictated by nutritional needs or environmental balance or food security of families and communities, but by efficiencies and economies that helped surplus value for a limited few. And suddenly the power equations in the homestead changes completely. The woman has little say in the affairs of the farm. The market dictates and men are the mediators with the market. Notions of value and usefulness change. Hundreds of trees, plants, shrubs and medicinal plants that thrive as wild growth are no more valuable; in fact, they are a hindrance to an orderly, efficient farm that needs to cater to the market. The food basket changes; shrinks. Wild food disappear completely. Tubers diminish. Fruit trees dwindle in numbers – their abundant green foliage is considered unsuitable for shade regulation that enable commercial production. And we add and change crops based on every whim and fancy of the market, never of course managing to beat the market – it is at its own game after all.

Today, Fair Trade Alliance Kerala, the small farmer collective that I work for, is involved in an effort to recapture the homestead farming traditions of Kerala. It is a small dream. We are about 5000 small farmers today. We will soon be about ten thousand in numbers. Small farmers in Kerala have really small holdings – about 3-4 acres on average. So that small dream talks about ten thousand farming families stewarding near about forty thousand acres of farm lands to conditions that are near akin to a tropical rain forest in crop and bio diversity. In the process, we are committed to be net food suppliers, and by food we mean not coffee and pepper and cashew that we grow for the distant markets, but food on the table as rice, fruits, vegetables and tubers for our families and communities. And in the process we are bargaining that women will re assert their due role and space in the management of the homestead farming economy. Bio diversity for us therefore is a food security issue; it is also as much a gender issue.

But what role will the market and trade, particularly international commodity trade play in this scenario that we strive to engender? Undoubtedly the massive haulage of commodities across continents is unsustainable for a climate challenged planet. Food miles and the ecological footprint of our consumption can be ignored only at our peril. But no, I am not proposing that the Italians be denied their favourite espresso. In fact, trade is as much a cultural exchange as it is a commodity exchange and, albeit in reduced volumes, it is here to stay and desirably so.

Let me therefore, as I sign off this evening, give you a glimpse of the salutary effect the type of international commodity trade that I practice and am an ardent proponent of has on biodiversity: Our farmers reside in the Western Ghats region of India and the United Nations recently declared it a World Heritage Site. The environmental sensitivity of farming operations there is critical, not just for us but for the whole world, given the climate challenged times we live in. Much of our farming locations fall also under the Nilgiri Biosphere, a global environmental hotspot. And as is natural for such a region and terrain, a significant portion of our farmlands adjoin tropical rain forests. With the stress that development has brought on the forests, with the forest stretch and forest wealth shrinking rapidly, man animal conflicts have grown. Wild boar and deer pose a problem that farmers even here will readily recognise. But what if a marauding troupe of wild elephants get to your farm and destroy standing crop that is the result of thirty or forty years of toil? That is exactly what is happening in several of our farming locations. And try talking to farmers in such situations about the need for forest and wild life protection and you can imagine the possible hostile reaction. And yet we almost intrinsically know that farmers and wild life have to not just coexist, but also thrive for our environmentally secure future. One of the first investments that was made with the social premium that Fair Trade Alliance Kerala secured by selling its products under the Fair Trade regime to the Italian market through CT M Altromercato was in a benign solar powered fencing between the forest and many of our farm lands. The fence acted as a mild deterrent that kept the animals to the forests. The cashew industry calls big sized cashew nuts, Jumbo Nuts. But in our case, the cashew nuts from farmlands that sensitively manage the man animal conflict are called jumbo nuts not for its size, but because they are elephant friendly nuts.

The fair price that consumers like you pay for our products makes this possible. And that brings me to the parting shot of this wonderful evening with you. A fair price is the best organic manure, through which bio diverse farming can thrive.

Thank you.
Tomy Mathew Vadakkancheril
Promoter, Fair Trade Alliance Kerala
Managing Director, Elements – Fair Organic