Abstract
Civil society has a critical role in bringing about the paradigm shift necessary for sustainability transitions in agriculture. It forms the backbone behind both scaling out and scaling up of these transitions. Its role as innovator, pioneer, campaigner, collaborator and co-creator of knowledge has been inadequately studied in the social movements, sustainability transitions and agroecology literature. This article traces the organic evolution of civil society action in India from the 1980s that reflects a rich and plural history, including a radical and early critique of the Green Revolution paradigm, rooting locally situated alternatives on farmers’ fields and co-creating a diverse set of concepts and practices based on principles from the emerging science of agroecology coupled with socio-economic concerns. As the Indian state aims to rapidly scale natural farming, there is a need for exploring more common ground beyond noisy contestations on terminology or treating civil society organisations (CSOs) as sub-contractors of government schemes. CSOs need to experiment with emerging large-scale opportunities by maintaining a delicate balance between being co-opted collaborators or reluctant partners. As a social movement, they should not lose sight of their recognition and ability to be voices for marginalised knowledge systems, innovators of alternatives and watchdogs of collective value-based action.
Keywords
Introduction
The current model of chemical-intensive agriculture, popularised through the Green Revolution (GR) since the late 1960s, is considered to be one of the reasons for unsustainability (Bawa and Seidler 2023; Katsir et al. 2024). Decades of chemical-intensive agricultural practices, actively promoted by the state and market, now pose multiple threats on the environment, farm livelihoods, state finances due to burgeoning subsidy bills and food safety. Agroecology ‘is an approach to agriculture and food systems that mimics nature, stresses the importance of local knowledge and participatory processes and prioritises the agency and voice of food producers over corporations and other elite actors’ (Anderson et al. 2021, 2 ; Carlile and Garnett 2021). Agroecology has emerged as a credible alternative paradigm with the literature seeing it broadly as a science, practice and movement (Wezel et al. 2009). It also covers rights of community over natural resources and incorporates ‘sovereignty’ as a concept.
Despite a strong body of evidence on both the fall-outs of intensive agriculture paradigm and on the potential of agroecology as an alternative paradigm, it is only in the recent past that the state has started accepting the need for sustainability transitions in agriculture in India. 1 Despite the growing literature on agroecology in recent years, estimated to be over 5,000 in Scopus, there are several gaps in representation and framing. The sustainability transitions literature has a very low representation on agriculture and from the Global South. The literature on agroecology and social movements under-represents the insights on/from civil society and particularly so from India. This article seeks to fill this gap by answering the following questions.
What has been the role of civil society in India in shaping agroecology and sustainability transitions in agriculture?
How has this changed and evolved over time and how has civil society sought to expand its work and outreach through scaling up and scaling out?
What implications do this have to social movements in agroecology generally and the particular context of large-scale scaling up of organic/natural farming in India?
Agroecology and social movements are a well-researched field internationally though not common parlance in India despite the prevalence of practices in its current form at least since the 1980s. The inadequate representation of India, in part, is due to the use of terms like organic farming, permaculture and natural farming than explicit use of agroecology and by the fact that agroecology is not yet a recognised domain or research field in India. Outside the formal scientific establishment, though, there has been significant activity at the grassroots with different nomenclatures and in literature, with scholars suggesting the need to take more seriously the knowledge dimensions of soil science, agroecology and the creative dissent of some of its researchers with India being seen as a ‘reluctant leader’ (Prasad 2019; Prasad et al. 2012; Raina et al. 2006).
We describe social movements as those public mobilisation processes which have a common and cohesive narrative that binds members of the movement together. They may or may not have rigid organisational structures but are organised to gather strength and momentum for members to be inspired and to undertake collective action to bring about progressive change in society. An important feature is the voluntarism found within social movements along with a selfless drive towards the common mission. In this article, we see civil society as contributing to and being an integral part of social movements. Further, we use the term civil society to describe individuals as well as non-state organisations, including ones in the market sphere but with an explicit purpose of social, environmental or economic justice. The emergence of several civil society organisations (CSOs) can be traced back to the developmental efforts of the state eluding the needy, and the fact that the state schemes and programmes were getting captured by the local elite without reaching the intended beneficiaries (Bebbington et al. 2005; Brown 2016). While some CSOs often engaged on fundamental issues of the development vision and undertook grassroots work in chosen areas to turn into reality this alternate vision, others emerged out of addressing specific problems (by undertaking thematic interventions like education, healthcare etc.). There are also CSOs that are membership-based (like farmer unions or workers’ unions) that have relied on the agency of those collectivised to secure basic rights and were usually both theme-focused and geographically widespread.
Social movements in the Global South are rooted in specific historical, political, socio-cultural and economic contexts that include a continuous redefinition of state–civil society relations. Civil society is often distinguished by political society in the dynamics of state–society relations, but agroecology movements in India have seen civil society as a space for middle-class activism and political society of advancing claims of the marginalised happening simultaneously (Fadaee 2019).
Most accounts of agroecology in India refer to developments in the 21st century, but we argue that agroecology has been an integral part of the discourse on knowledge from civil society since the 1980s and is rooted in alternatives to the GR. Thus, while the discussions relating social movements to agroecology, specifically La Via Campesina, have been presented extensively in the Latin American context (Rosset and Martínez-Torres 2014), we suggest that the Indian origin of agroecology has a different context drawing strongly from the Gandhian tradition of constructive work (Mansata 2014; Sanford 2013). The search for self-sufficiency and sovereignty/autonomy is often linked to Gandhi’s philosophy and ideas of Swaraj, and the idea of Swaraj has been an integral part of India’s agroecology movement.
Through the case of civil society action on agroecology in India, we suggest a relook at social movements in the Global South and explore agroecology as a sub-altern knowledge movement. Civil society, we argue, has had a very rich history of engagement with alternatives to industrial agriculture, and its contribution can be broadly grouped into three phases. In Part 1, we trace civil society’s pioneering role in the 1980s. Part 2 captures the 1990s, when action shifted from individuals to organisations and group activism. In the subsequent decades, significant collaborations between the organisations and the emergence of multiple organisational forms are highlighted, as Part 3. The establishment of networks and greater institutionalisation that includes collaboration with the state is a feature of the 21st-century association that is captured in Part 4 of the article. In our concluding section in Part 5, we explore the challenges and tensions that face CSOs as they seek to expand their contribution and face several dilemmas. Should they primarily work with the state as ‘service providers’ in the quest for acceleration or amplification, and can they do so without diluting their vision and worldview? How much should they focus on agroecology as a broader domain or paradigm that emphasises the science, when the research establishment is yet to treat agroecology as a discipline, and the state has favoured a particular practice of ‘Natural Farming’ over diverse approaches that farmers and civil society groups have promoted over several decades? Are there some essential characteristics to civil society action that need to be protected for state-led scaling up to remain sustainable? We conclude that there is ample opportunity for constructive engagement of the state with civil society on the values, principles, science, practice and policy of agroecology as many experiments from the states of India suggest. Equally, the forgotten role of civil society in envisioning and forecasting the problems with the current paradigm of development, pioneering and pluralising knowledge, foregrounding grassroot innovations, contributing to alternative policy design, diversifying for complementary roles, hand-holding the state as well as farmers in implementation of programmes and bringing awareness among consumers needs greater recognition and revival.
Sustainability transitions are not easy to scale. Unlike GR practices that are input-intensive and ‘easy’ to disseminate, agroecology is knowledge-intensive, requiring farmers to change their practices, experiment and be involved in social learning in smaller groups such as Farmer Field Schools. This transition requires consumers and state to change too. These transitions are thus not easy to scale. ‘Scaling out’ and ‘Scaling up’ are two terms used to differentiate between two distinct pathways for the spread of positive change, which in this article’s context is agroecology. Scaling out is understood to be led by non-state actors primarily, and scaling up by state-directed policy and institutional changes that are supportive of agroecology (Gliessman 2018; Wijeratna 2018). While scaling out has greater possibility of the transition being sustainable, but in small islands of change, scaling up offers opportunities for acceleration and larger impacts. Scaling up requires and can be sustainable only if accompanied by system-wide transformation. These two processes are complementary. The process of scaling out as a social movement can provide the foundational work and conceptual clarity for scaling-up efforts to gather momentum. Scaling up, in turn, can create a certain ecosystem and atmosphere that facilitates easier and more rapid scaling out. ‘Mainstreaming’ is considered the final step, wherein agroecology becomes the dominant paradigm of farming in policy and practice.
Recent experience with regard to scaling up of agroecology in India—whether it is related to Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA) in undivided Andhra Pradesh or the Andhra Pradesh Community Natural Farming (APCNF) programme dubbed as the world’s largest state-supported agroecology initiative (Bharucha, Mitjans, and Pretty 2020; Gupta et al. 2021; Dorin 2022), or the Odisha Millets Mission (Raina et al. 2022), or even the Government of India’s organic farming interventions from time to time (Khurana and Kumar 2020; Khurana, Halim, and Singh 2022)—shows the important, yet insufficiently acknowledged, role that civil society in India has played, to support the scaling-up efforts by the state. Scaling up natural farming or agroecology that ignores the role of civil society is beset with challenges as witnessed in the state of Gujarat (Prasad, Chakraborty, and Dutta 2024). This article explores the diverse manifestations of civil society players in transition to agroecology.
Pioneering Agroecology in India in the 1980s
Recent scholarship has reiterated the Gandhian critique of artificial fertilisation on soil health by Kumarappa a decade before the GR and Vinoba’s post-independence experiments on ‘Rishi-kheti’ (Ajl and Sharma 2022; Sanford 2013) and its popular link with violence and ecological ruin (Shiva 1991). The responses to the ill effects of GR though came from a few farmers who foresaw the fall-outs of the industrial intensive agriculture paradigm from the 1980s itself and started working on building a discourse and practice against it. These pioneers, several of them Gandhians, used different terms for the approaches that they adopted and promoted—rishi kheti, sajiv kheti, sarvangi krushi, prakritik kheti, sendriya kheti, swavalambi kheti and so on 2 in Indian languages which were translated as organic farming, natural farming and ecological agriculture in English. To keep pace with the understanding and nomenclature at international level, the modern ‘organic farming’ term came to dominate the discourse at the national level subsequently, even as the local terms used for agroecological paradigms continue to be diverse to this day in different parts of India. Table 1 captures key developments in the early spread of agroecology in India.
Early Spread of Agroecology by Pioneers.
The initial phase of rooting agroecology was through a diverse set of practices under permaculture, organic, natural farming or LEISA. A common feature is the critique of the intensive agriculture paradigm and its negative implications for farm economics, environment, sovereignty of the farmers/farming communities and human health. Coincidentally, some of the earliest organic farming experiments were in Madhya Pradesh that had seen the disastrous effect of a gas disaster in a pesticide factory in Bhopal in 1984 that was both a wake-up call and highlighted the need for alternatives.
Several individuals experimented with a missionary zeal to explore and understand nature, adopting certain values in their living that included being compassionate to all living beings and freeing farmers from market-driven exploitation through farm inputs. They also chose to spread the healthy food movement widely through knowledge-building and sharing. These diverse strands involved pioneering farmers like Bhaskar Save, Narayana Reddy, Bharamagoudra and others who practised chemical farming first and then retraced their steps to become model ecological agriculturists. Activist-enthusiasts from the middle class, like Partap Aggarwal, Dr Venkat, Vandana Shiva, Kapil Shah and Nammalvar, took to ecological farming promotion from their ideological positions, and there were early seeds of institutional efforts—Gloria Land, DDS, Permaculture Association of India, Kudumbam and so on. There were also the odd experiments of researchers, though outside the formal agricultural establishment, except for Dr Richharia, venturing into ecological agriculture like Prof Arora or the IIT Delhi experiment in Mohanpur. The 1980s also saw early networking initiated by Patriotic and People-oriented Science and Technology (PPST) Group and the LEISA Network started by AME Foundation and Dr Nammalvar. PPST took up knowledge building through its Bulletins, 3 while ILEIA newsletters started in 1984. APIGR and Anna Jagruti Kendra organised conventions. These initiatives led to more practitioners who experimented, innovated, critiqued the GR and created opportunities for learning and sharing.
Organising for Networks and Collectives in the 1990s
The scaling-out movement started gathering force in the 1990s with CSOs and networks actively engaged in spreading the movement. The first Traditional Sciences Congress held by PPST in 1993 at IIT Mumbai had a session on pest management without synthetic chemicals in the Agriculture Section. Pedagogical tools like study groups of farmers for joint learning were pioneered in Maharashtra by Shripad Dabholkar in his Prayog Pariwar work, independent of the now-famous Farmer Field Schools. Dabholkar’s model of 10-guntha ecological agriculture later morphed into ‘natu-eco farming’ for several, including urban gardeners. 4 The Biodynamic Movement started in India in 1993, when Peter Proctor of the international BioDynamic Association was invited by T. G. K. Menon, Director of the Kasturbagram Krishi Kshethra. 5 In 1995, the Agricultural Renewal in India for a Sustainable Environment or ARISE network was co-founded by Bernard Declercq, Vandana Shiva, Claude Alvares and others in Auroville.
Table 2 summarises the developments in 1990s that shows the simultaneity of efforts of farmers and organisations.
Agroecology and Civil Society in the 1990s.
A notable feature of this decade is the work on protection and revival of traditional seed diversity, as an integral part of agroecology. This includes the pioneering work of Vijay Jardhari and Beej Bachao Andolan, Dr Debal Deb and Basudha’s Vrihi seed bank, Deepika Kundaji’s work in Auroville through Aurobrindavan and Pebble Garden farms. This work laid the basis of understanding around traditional agro-diversity and agroecological farming in the 1990s. This was also a period with active resistance against patents and other intellectual property rights (IPRs) on seeds and seed varieties.
Under the leadership of Claude Alvares and others, a directory was published that collated the rich and diverse agroecological concepts and practices in India (Alvares 1996). Farmers and CSOs were busy innovating and promoting ecological agriculture in numerous forms, with different nomenclatures, and were working in mission mode, supporting each other. At the end of this decade, with the illegal introduction of Bt cotton, there was resistance against modern biotechnology from these promoters and farmers (Bharathan 2000).
Emergence of Cross-geography Civil Society Networks
The 21st century saw greater institutionalisation of civil society in agroecology, with a gradual stepping back of individual pioneers. This period saw an emergence of multiple organisational forms, including practising farmers’ formal collectives, ‘resource CSOs’ and greater collaborations within civil society. Institution-building at the ground level was as much a part of agroecology as farm-level production practices. End-to-end interventions across the agricultural value chain from production to consumption became more prevalent. More outreach to urban consumers through melas and bazaars became a regular feature of the movement. The entry of bigger capital into market-led initiatives and donor funds for projects around organic farming were distinct features of the initiatives in the decades starting from 2000s (Khurana and Kumar 2020; Narayanan 2005). The market became a big driver of agroecology, with the organic industry getting more visible than the organic movement, primarily at the output end, but also at the bio-inputs end (Singh et al. 2023).
Networks and National Platforms
The efforts at transitioning farmers away from a chemical-intensive agriculture paradigm have seen the formation of several platforms that co-exist and collaborate in interesting and complementary ways. This is relevant as most decisions in the policy and state institutional ecosystem, like increasing subsidies for agrochemicals and little support for organic or natural, are outside the farm. These platforms found ways of aligning the needs of governments with that of agroecology; for example, the need to reduce the burgeoning chemical fertiliser subsidy bill, or the electricity subsidy borne by governments to support monocropped-paddy in states like Punjab. By this time, the fall-outs of GR paradigm were officially accepted by state agencies and the need for alternatives was acknowledged in policy circles.
The Organic Farming Association of India (OFAI) was set up in 2002; in a way, it emerged from the ARISE network. OFAI’s biennial conventions became the platform for learning and sharing and widening the networks. By 2006, led by OFAI, a civil society-led farmer-centric quality assurance regime was also set up called the Participatory Guarantee System-Organic Council (PGS-OC). 6 International connections were made stronger due to platforms like OFAI. A network that was focused on creating an enabling policy framework for India’s rainfed farmers was the Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture Network (RRA-N) set up through a Working Group in 2009 (Chhatre, Sinha, and Basu 2016), 7 the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) set up in 2010 through a nation-wide Kisan Swaraj Yatra, Bharat Beej Swaraj Manch was formed in 2014 and National Coalition for Natural Farming (NCNF) set up in 2020. There are also specialised networks on indigenous cattle breeds, Himalayan agriculture and so on apart from campaigning platforms like Coalition for a genetically modified (GM)-Free India to resist the entry of genetically modified organism (GMOs) in India and India for Safe Food, to resist agro-chemicals.
Networks are in a sense the new social movements. While OFAI shaped itself as an organisation of practising organic farmers, RRA Network is focused on engaging the spaces that prioritise ecological agriculture as an imperative for rainfed areas. It is also a network that ‘engages from within’ especially in terms of sensitive bureaucrats and technocrats in different government departments and agencies, through pilots and evidence-building. ASHA is a platform of citizen-volunteers which has shaped itself as an advocacy platform that undertakes resistance activities and campaigns, supports constructive work showcasing alternatives and becoming a bridge between urban and rural, producer and consumer (Pandey, Gazol, and Pansera 2024). NCNF, as the latest national platform, is a network of NGOs building a larger ecosystem conducive for the spread of ecological agriculture. Another national platform active in the field of agroecology that actively seeks women farmers’ leadership in agroecological transitions is MAKAAM (Mahila Kisan Adhikaar Manch).
Support for agroecology has also come from religious and spiritual organisations like the Swadhyay Pariwar, Brahmakumaris, Art of Living from around 2005.
Some farmer unions have also promoted agroecological approaches—Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha and Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, for example. However, given the nature of struggles that farmer unions engage in, which are immediate and tangible gains for the struggling farmers like compensation for crop losses or irrigation water or procurement of crop produce at remunerative prices, agroecology has not been the priority of farmer unions as much as for some NGOs. The contrast between sangharsh (struggle) and nirman (constructive work) is split across these different kinds of CSOs. Despite these limitations, even the historic Kisan Andolan of 2020–21 witnessed the inclusion of environmental concerns by farmer unions in their demand for legally guaranteed MSP (Pandey and Kuruganti 2024).
Market-based Initiatives
Several market-based initiatives began in the 2000s. DDS set up ‘Café Ethnic’ restaurant as the first organic millets eatery in India in 2003. Thanal and Institute for Integrated Rural Development facilitated Organic Bazaars for urban customers from 2003 to 2004. ReStore was set up in 2008 as a not-for-profit social enterprise in Chennai by a group of professionals who returned to India after leaving their jobs abroad. An offshoot was the Organic Farmers’ Market (OFM), which evolved into a retailers’ cooperative in a hub-and-spokes model.
A parallel set of initiatives focused on setting up Organic Producers’ Organisations for marketing. Dharani Cooperative set up by Timbaktu Collective (2008) and Sittilingi Organic Farmers Association/SOFA set up by Tribal Health Initiative (2008) are examples. With the emergence of Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) as a new organisational form, Chetna Organic Agriculture Producer Company Ltd (2009) was set up as a federated company of multiple farmers’ cooperatives in three states, Sahaja Aharam (2009) as a producer-consumer cooperative set up by Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA), and the Desi Seed FPC (2013) focusing on production and sale of organic traditional varieties of seeds emerged as newer alternatives. Sahaja Organics set up as an FPC in 2010 specialises in distribution of organic produce.
Commercial enterprises also expanded during this time. Sresta’s 24 Mantra Organic was set up in 2004, which subsequently grew into the biggest organic business in the country. Morarka Organic was set up in 2006, Akshayakalpa Organic in 2010. The organic export market as well as domestic market started booming. At present, new-age start-ups are also active in the space of agroecology, with several of them creating digital platforms.
International Networking
Over the decades, international CSOs including International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) built live connections with India’s agroecological movement. Here, the learning exchanges were bi-directional and several pioneers from India were part of the global Board of Governance of IFOAM, shaping the international spread of agroecology too.
From the above narrative we can identify some features of the agroecology scaling-out movement from 1980 to 2010. It helped root and shape the concept of agroecology in India and elsewhere, even as there was little interest from the agricultural research community. There was space for diverse approaches and nomenclatures with emphasis on local suitability. Experiments and innovations, with scientific understanding and knowledge, were given importance. There was high voluntary action, a missionary zeal and a willingness to share and be inclusive. While some did not shy from opposing the state, a few believed in collaborating with the state. Inclusion of marginalised farmers (women, adivasi, rainfed smallholders) was the focus of many initiatives. Despite diverse organisational forms, the importance of alternative development paradigms, rooted in socio-economic justice to farmers, environmental regeneration and self-reliance and sovereignty were commonly-held values. The movement engaged with other social movements that included advocates of de-growth, Gandhian economy, people’s science, environmentalism, feminism, food and farmers’ rights movement.
Balancing Collaboration with Autonomy: Civil Society and Scaling-up Agroecology
Unlike scaling-out that depends largely on spread through civil society, ‘scaling-up’ is understood as a state-led initiative for expanding the practice of agroecology through state institutions, policies, schemes and finances. Scaling-up was campaigned for, by many in the civil society, so that positive change can be accelerated, and a larger number of farmers, consumers and land parcels can be transformed. Here, the state is not just the culprit to be attacked and resisted, but is the agency through which large-scale system-level changes can be brought about, by working with creative dissenters in the government until ‘mainstreaming’ happens (Prasad et al. 2012; Ramanjaneyulu et al. 2009).
The first efforts in Independent India with regard to getting public sector institutions to look at agroecology emerged from current-day Telangana (Nalgonda area) in 1989 with the establishment of non-pesticidal management of crop pests (NPM) through a collaborative effort between ICAR, AP Agriculture Department and the Centre for World Solidarity (CWS). Elsewhere, in Vidarbha in the mid-1990s, Central Institute of Cotton Research (CICR) endorsed organic cotton cultivation practices through workshops and technical bulletins. Vidarbha Organic Farmers’ Association (VOFA) and CICR collaborated along with exporters for organic certification. While the Telangana initiative was almost an imperative for the agriculture department, the Vidarbha initiative was an opportunity for a research institute.
At the national level, from the Ministry of Commerce, a push for organic farming to ensure greater exports of premium-priced organic produce emerged in 2001 as National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP). The thrust from the Ministry of Commerce was to establish standards and quality assurance regimes with an eye on export markets. In 2003, the north eastern hilly state of Sikkim created a roadmap for converting the entire state’s agriculture into certified organic farming by 2016 (Meek and Anderson 2020). As a large state (unlike Sikkim), Karnataka created an organic farming policy for the first time in the country in 2004; a separate scheme was started for supporting farmers to adopt organic farming called Savayava Bhagya. CSOs were involved in the implementation of the scheme and ample flexibility was provided with regard to local fund utilisation by farmers’ groups. The scheme, however, underestimated the period for transition to agroecology in its 3-year design. By 2023, at least 13 states had organic farming policies, but did not necessarily back it up with schemes, nor deliver on the commitments made. Mizoram and Uttarakhand also had separate legislations for regulation of agro-chemicals and promotion of organic farming. Several of these policies and schemes at the state level have a focus on women’s collectives as an important institutional platform for promoting organic farming. At the Union Government level, Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana (MKSP) was the first scheme from the Ministry of Rural Development, in 2011; Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana (PKVY) was introduced in 2015 under Ministry of Agriculture. However, this major initiative had little involvement of CSOs in its implementation and even sought 10% of the programme cost for CSOs to be service providers, reflecting the uneasy relation of the state with CSOs at the national level.
In terms of state-level programmes and schemes, Andhra Pradesh has been the leader. Beginning in 2004–05, in the undivided state of Andhra Pradesh, a CMSA programme was initiated through its rural development department’s Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) to promote non-pesticidal management of crop cultivation on a very large scale, through women’s self-help groups. Leading this was a senior bureaucrat, T Vijay Kumar, who later spearheaded agroecology nationally through the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM). This new model of community-based extension through women Community Resource Persons (CRPs) was a sharp contrast to the GR model of public extension that was at various stages of disrepair across the country and private extension systems ending up oversupplying chemicals at farmers’ fields through ‘merchants of knowledge’ (Aga 2018). Advocacy of civil society networks, champions within the bureaucracy, emphasis on rural livelihoods and the 20-year history of consensus building around agroecology all played a key role in the adoption of the Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) programme in AP, later renamed APCNF (Veluguri 2021). This is currently the country’s largest agroecology programme supported by the state, with a separate Department for Natural Farming set up for the purpose (Bharucha, Mitjans, and Pretty 2020). The initial years had several CSOs involved, with resource NGOs and field NGOs performing their specific roles in implementation.
Coming to the agricultural research establishment, work on agroecology has been scanty here, often restricted to a few passionate researchers. There are few research programmes on agroecology despite significant scientific human resources across central research institutes, state agricultural universities and extension centres. Institutional arrangements discourage working with farmers and civil society (Prasad 2019). The irrefutable findings of the All-India Network Project on Organic Farming, even with its limitations in the research protocols adopted and agroecology practices included, have not been able to influence the mainstream discourse within the government, nor lend confidence to policy-makers, even though the findings did not emerge from civil society but from within a government research institute in the ICAR set-up (Khurana, Halim, and Singh 2022). In fact, Andhra Pradesh government had to set up a specialised institute for natural farming research in 2022 (quite outside the conventional institutional architecture meant for such research) called the Indo-German Global Academy for Agroecology Research & Learning (IGGAARL) with support from international agencies for taking up agroecology research and training with latest science, methodologies and multi-disciplinary teams. 8
In most of the scaling-up efforts mentioned above, civil society has had an important role in initiating and supporting the state’s policy or programmes. Organic farming policies in many states were drafted with organic farmers, CSOs and other representatives of the agroecology scaling-out movement. The large-scale CMSA work in Andhra Pradesh had a few state-level technical resource organisations like CSA and the Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN).
Unlike other sectors (clean energy, green transport or holistic health) where scaling up of sustainable alternatives was undertaken after civil society campaigning, establishing proof of concept, developing technology and so on, in several agroecology programmes and schemes of the country, civil society involvement has largely been continuous even after a scheme has been formulated. This could be because the state cannot also partner with market players in a paradigm which shuns the active involvement of big businesses in organic inputs and output markets. This is again different from other sectors like solar energy transitions, for instance, where big players captured the market.
For any paradigm-level transformation like in agroecology that requires appropriate knowledge, motivation and behaviour change for the purpose, consistent support to farming families is essential, which can be made possible only with the involvement of other self-motivated farmers and committed promoters in the civil society working at the grassroots. In this knowledge-driven farming paradigm, given that the state has not equipped itself on Agroecology knowledge, dependence on civil society is somewhat inevitable. On all the above counts, therefore, the continued involvement of civil society is essential.
Fissures in Agroecology Movement and Possible Civil Society Response
Divergence of views and opinions, which was more accommodative in the agroecology movement of India in the past, has become deeply contested and confrontational in recent times. Subhash Palekar has been the charismatic proponent of ZBNF (which underwent nomenclature changes later). Several state governments and the national government have invited him for enabling transition to natural farming. Due to an artificial dichotomy created by him between natural farming and organic farming, fissures started emerging in the movement. The indigenous cow has had a revival in recent times leading to concerns voiced about ‘bio-nativism’ and ‘bio-nationalism’ (Fitzpatrick, Millner, and Ginn 2022; Munster 2021). Expectably, these tensions spill out into scaling-up processes too. A new scheme called Bharatiya Prakritik Krishi Paddhati (BPKP) was started by the Government of India, different from PKVY, to accommodate these developments. It appears that Palekar’s insistence on no external inputs in his model of natural farming led to the Government of India now coming up with a proposal for new standards for natural farming, and certification regimes that assure quality of produce from natural farming. While multiple nomenclatures and certification regimes could cause confusion in the minds of consumers, the key point of distinction being made between Natural and Organic Farming regimes (no external bio-inputs) is not borne out on the ground, in farmers’ practices of natural farming.
Another controversy is around the ‘financialisation’ of agroecology scaling up (Ramdas and Pimbert 2024). However, critics of financialisation have not proposed how funding can be provided to AgroEcology scaling up (that too within the time scales that anthropogenic climate change is demanding), in the absence of political will in the state, and absence of strong pressure from civil society without which the state is not likely to change by itself.
Another unfolding debate is around carbon credits. Some civil society players have started financing local transition efforts through this route, while others are strongly articulating a state-sponsored Payment for EcoSystem Services (PES) as the best approach to incentivise farmers. The contentions around different nomenclatures persist, and wariness exists around ‘regenerative agriculture’ camouflaging big (seed and chemical) industry plans to profiteer in the name of agroecology.
The tensions brought in by market forces are also apparent between civil society players engaged in export markets for organic produce and the ones setting up localised markets for organic produce. Like in other sectors of ‘sustainable alternatives’, big brands in the organic markets have taken over the market space, with the cooperative giant Amul also entering the space, while there are many small social enterprises that are struggling to set up localised social enterprises as livelihood-centric models for localised food systems (Kuruganti 2017). Questions have been posed around the niche elite markets being created for organic produce and whether sustainability as a concept is applicable only to producers and not to consumers. The flourishing premium market of organic products attracts fake products, leading to loss of consumer confidence. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI’s) regulations on mandatory certification of organic food products without accounting for the ground realities of practising farmers and certification regimes has ended up forcing several genuine producers to not to use term ‘organic’.
While the above debates rage within the civil society of India, state programmes and schemes present their own challenges and problems. Civil society is confronted with the dilemma of collaborating with programmes that are often centralised in their design, too short term for real transitions to be supported and devoid of the holistic frameworks that encompass agroecology. The problem in fact begins with lack of adequate number of champion political leaders/bureaucrats/technocrats who are convinced and can implement the scaling-up schemes and policies in letter and spirit. Even in the case of committed ambassadors in the establishment, the depth of understanding of these champions does not necessarily percolate down till the frontline workers in the government departments. Where CSOs engage in a collaborative spirit with governments, they are often unable to influence the badly designed programmes and end up becoming meek service providers for a fee. Numerous anecdotes exist of the financial hardships that civil society is put through, when CSOs become implementation partners in state-led initiatives.
There are reports emerging of attrition of farmers enrolled in agroecology programmes, back into chemical farming. This situation is likely to persist as long as the dominant paradigm being promoted by the state extension departments and market forces is antithetical to agroecology. Maintaining high quality of knowledge dissemination (even in innovative extension approaches like farmer-to-farmer extension) and the ability to create end-to-end interventions in a government establishment, where the existing institutional architecture permits only work in silos, are critical challenges. The lack of possibility of constant hand-holding of farmers transitioning to agroecology, inadequate attention to institution-building, the compulsion to standardise agroecological practices and products into manageable but prescriptive Package of Practices are some illustrations of the other challenges being faced, putting a big question mark on the sustainability of the transition.
While it is civil society that created pressure on the state into promoting agroecology (along with tangible fall-outs from the GR paradigm), there is now a quandary at the current situation. Against this backdrop, a renewed focus of civil society on scaling out seems critical, since that is the pool from where human resources and new scientific practices and knowledge are expected to feed into scaling up efforts, with locally-situated models that are ready to be replicated.
We believe that the current proponents of agroecology need to situate their work within the longer history of alternative imaginations in agriculture in India. In summary, there are several elements of agroecology as a value, science, practice and social movement that need to be reinstated and strengthened. Civil society collectively can continue playing the roles of a crusader, campaigner and contestor, in addition to the role of a constructive worker, the way Gandhi would have advocated.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
