In the countryside of Andhra Pradesh, an agricultural state in southeastern India, which launched the world's largest agroecology program in 2016, nearly one million farmers have already switched to "natural farming", abandoning GMOs, and pesticides, fungicides and chemical fertilizers. This "natural agriculture" wants to repair the earth and to relieve the 8 million peasants of this state, confronted with the impoverishment of the soils and the over-indebtedness.

The Green Revolution, initiated by Nehru in the 1960s, had brought the Indian countryside out of famine by relying on the massive use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers and on intense irrigation. This program of agrarian modernization made India, which has the second largest agricultural area in the world, the first producer of milk and the second largest producer of wheat, rice, cotton, sugar, tea, fruits and vegetables. But this success based on intensive monoculture has led to a long series of setbacks, such as increased dependence on these inputs, the erosion of biodiversity they cause, as well as soil degradation, pollution and depletion of water tables, all aggravated by climate change. And when soils are impoverished, so are farmers. Hence the infernal cycle of over-indebtedness and its share of suicides and rural exodus: it is estimated that 350,000 farmers have taken their own lives in India since the mid-1990s.

Hence the bet to get out of chemical agriculture for its 8 million farmers. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is also a stakeholder in this large-scale project. So are many international researchers. And more and more farmers are making this choice: 900,000 farmers in Andhra Pradesh have already changed their practices, pesticide consumption has decreased by 23%, and the authorities have given themselves another 5 years to achieve this conversion.

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