The dominant notion of agri-food system emphasis on the calory requirement and the quantity of grains required to feed the growing population and hence demand for techno-managerial solutions for further intensification of production and incremental innovations. These incremental changes in the existing agri-food regime are in favor of large-scale farming systems and hardly address the concerns of smallholder farmers and resilience of marginal and small-scale food production systems. Moreover, the dominant agri-food regime has failed to ensure increased food and nutrition security with respect to the increase in food production. In this context, what we require are system level changes that acknowledge the multifunctionality of agriculture and de-linking agriculture from the notion of large-scale intensive production.
Decentralization of safe-to-eat food production is inevitable to address the increasing vulnerabilities elicited by the conventional mode of food production. Food production has to be concentrated in marginal and small-holders farms and it has to be further extended from farms to food and nutrition gardens in backyards, rooftops, and all other available spaces. Urban food production also needs to be adopted to ensure the resilience of urban systems and to minimise the export of wastes outside the urban setting. The ongoing interventions to ensure self-reliance on the production of safe-to-eat vegetables in Kerala (India) would be of importance in this context.
To address the vulnerabilities experienced due to dependent food economy and conventional agriculture, Kerala is in the making of a transition towards self-reliant and sustainable agri-food systems, especially in the case of vegetables. Adoption of food system localization and agroecological practices have become an agenda of the government and R&D. In order to facilitate this, the Vegetable Development Program (started in 2012) of the state government of Kerala explores every possible space for safe-to-eat food production that includes schools, government institutions, backyards and on rooftops of both rural and urban areas. The rural-urban continuum, high population density, and space constraints made it inevitable to consider food production in the urban setting as well. This is mainly carried out through the promotion of home-based nutrition gardens and also by providing portable composting units and/or biogas units to recycle the biodegradable kitchen wastes so as to use for vegetable gardening. Both the government and social actors play key roles to develop new technologies and practices for vegetable cultivation. New and improved technologies and methods of vegetable cultivation in the backyards and rooftops of rural and urban premises have received a place in the government policy as well as in the R &D agenda of Kerala. The main emphasis of both the actors is to develop solutions to overcome the spatial constraints of Kerala and to adopt agroecological methods of cultivation. The government subsidy schemes facilitate diffusion of grow-bags (with vegetable saplings) and protected cultivation technologies (polyhouse/greenhouse and rain shelter) amongst the rural and urban residents, along with drip-irrigation units for water conservation.
The bottom-up actions from the social actors take a complementary approach. Social media, particularly facebook (FB), has become a platform for the enactment of these activities. Interested people started different groups on facebook which aimed to promote different aspects of food system localization and agroecology including grassroots innovations. These groups are operated in Malayalam, the vernacular language of Kerala and the group member comprises of Keralites living in different parts of the globe. The objectives of these groups includes promotion of kitchen gardening, promotion of commercial farming adopting organic and agroecological practices, marketing of organically grown produce etc. Some of the activities prominent in these Facebook groups include sharing of seeds of local and traditional crops, conducting annual kitchen garden competitions, providing platform for sales of home-grown surplus produce, annual meets to further strengthening their activities etc. Apart from adopting some of these technologies (and also while rejecting some), they develop their own methods and technologies which are shared to each other through these facebook groups and thereby reinforce the government intervention by filling the gaps.
The ongoing transitions in the agri-food system of Kerala are entrusted upon extending food production from farms to gardens and replacing hazardous chemicals with locally available or locally developed measures. In this way, food production is becoming a routine of many of the households, schools, and government and private institutions. This does not only enhance the resilience of the entire locality to withstand the externalities of a dependent food economy but also helps to strengthen the local level production for local level consumption.
More details can be found at https://steps-centre.org/blog/kerala-making-transition-towards-healthy-…
Dr. Anita Pinheiro