Agroecology and Sustainable Smallholder Agriculture: An Exploratory Analysis with Some Tentative Indications from the Recent Experience of Natural Farming in Andhra Pradesh – Prof. D Narasimha Reddy
Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) is a unique initiative. It is neither an organisation promoted by the civil society (NGO) or farmers’ movement as in Karnataka (Khadse et. al. 2017) or as a social movement as elsewhere in many other territories especially in Latin America (Cacho et.al. 2010), nor is it directly by the state initiative as in Sikkim (Meek and Anderson 2019). APCNF is under Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (RySS) a special corporation created by the government of Andhra Pradesh for the specific purpose of promotion of natural farming, but works within the purview of the legal and administrative framework of the state. Though the immediate context was the influence of Subhash Palekar’s alternative agricultural paradigm of Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF), the antecedents that have acted as a strong motivation and driving force, go back to the Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA) of the erstwhile combined state of Andhra Pradesh (Kumar et. al. 2007). Encouraged by the enthusiastic response of farmers towards
Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) of crops, CMSA was setup in 2004 by the Society for the Elimination of Poverty (SERP) 5 under the poverty reduction programme, viz. Indira Kranthi Patham (IKP). Starting with 4000 acres of land in 12 villages in 2004, CMSA promoted NPM practices involving replacement of chemical pesticides with a combination of physical and biological measures including bio-pesticides and it soon spread to over 3 lakh farmers cultivating 1.36 million acres of farm land in the erstwhile combined state of Andhra Pradesh (Kumar et.al.2009). The pace of progress waned by 2014 due to the lack of ownership of the programme by the Agriculture Department of the State Government and it ended with the conclusion of certain financial inducement built into it. Read more…