“Leveraging agriculture for nutrition’’ sounds pompous and redundant, a statement of the glaringly obvious.
But it isn’t so really…how else would you explain malnutrition and undernourishment in a farmer household?
Take this cluster of 556 households in five villages in the Wardha region of Vidarbha district of Maharashtra and the 658 households of seven villages in the Koraput district of Odisha, for instance. The year was 2014.
In both areas, over 45% of children under age five were underweight, 35% were stunted and about 27% wasted. 33% of children had Vitamin A deficiency. In both the locations, more women (47%) had Chronic Energy Deficiency (CED) than men. About 70% of children under age five in Koraput and 83% in Wardha had anaemia.
In Wardha, over 80% of girls in the age groups of 12-17 were anaemic, while in Koraput around 60% of the girls were anaemic. In both Wardha and Koraput, about 55-60% of pregnant women and 75% of lactating women were anaemic.
In short, a grim scenario of severe and widespread malnutrition, as per this data collected by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in 2014.
The story would hold true for many other villages across the country, for that matter. Small and marginal farming households (who own and cultivate in less than two hectares of land) and landless farmhands are the worst affected.
One of the glaring cropping anomalies was that, in both locations, the farmers weren’t growing nutritious food for their daily needs, and simply focused on cultivation for profits.
“Even when it came to grains, it was cereal dominated. These families sourced nutrient-rich Ragi (finger millet) from the market. The Public Distribution System (PDS) also tends to encourage rice consumption over other grains”, points out MSSRF agricultural scientist Dr R V Bhavani.
Bhavani is also Project Manager for LANSA – Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia, an international consortium of which MSSRF is a leading organisation.
The way MSSRF saw it, the solution was obvious. For farming households to have nutritious food on their plates every day, all that’s needed is a tweaking of the agricultural practices. And they opted for a farmer-led strategy.
What could make a direct and immediate impact on the farming family’s nutritional status is what’s grown and how it’s grown.
So MSSRF designed a Farming System for Nutrition programme, using agricultural remedies for nutritional deficiencies, including that deficiencies of micronutrients like zinc, iron, iodine, vitamin A etc.
These agricultural scientists introduced pulses like pigeon pea, green gram and sorghum as intercrops in the notorious cotton fields of Vidarbha.
While tuber crops like sweet potato were being grown in Koraput, the white flesh traditional varieties contain no pro-vitamin.
So they introduced the beta carotene-rich orange-fleshed sweet potato. Imagine, a 100-g serving (about half a cup) of this tuber supplies about 50% of the daily Vitamin A requirement of a young child!
Intercropping with pigeon pea in Koraput and with cotton in Wardha let farmers harvest both from the same field, besides getting the field fertilized through biological nitrogen fixation by the pigeon pea plant.
Zinc and iron-rich (bio-fortified) wheat varieties were also introduced in Wardha.
And these have real-world effects beyond food, including the all crucial income. For instance, Dadarao Kamble of Heti village in Wardha used to grow cotton and soybean in his five acres of land. He then started growing half-acre each of biofortified varieties of wheat like Nethravathi (NIAW1415) and Sardar (AKAW1445) during the rabi season.
“I obtained 2200 kilos from that one acre and also supplied seed materials to neighbouring farmers and got additional income”, he says.
Households that had a backyard were encouraged to grow nutrient-rich vegetables and fruits (206 in Koraput and 246 in Wardha). The households that didn’t have this area grew these vegetables in a separate patch on their fields itself.
For these gardens, MSSRF scientists created seasonal calendars of locally available vegetables, distributed the seeds for the same, and also saplings of moringa, mango, guava, sapota, pomegranate, lemon and papaya.
They shared green leafy vegetables to combat anaemia and coloured vegetables like carrot and red pumpkin to prevent vitamin A deficiency.
Ghenu Khillo, of Atalguda village in Koraput, is one of those actively involved in backyard kitchen gardening. She grows papaya and moringa as well as other seasonal vegetables and climbers alongside the orange-fleshed sweet potato.
“My children love to eat the sweet potato due to the colour. But I am now aware that eating orange-coloured vegetables is good for eyesight. Now, we all have started consuming carrot and coriander. I am also practising intercropping of maize and pigeon pea and harvest two crops from the same field.” she says.
In the case of landless farmhand families, especially in Wardha, MSSRF encouraged and helped women in these farmer households to set up community gardens on Panchayat lands and in local schools. About 10-12 women come together to manage this community garden and share the work and the produce.
Ushatai Kourati of the Borgaon village in Wardha is one of them. “As space was not available with the Gram Panchayat, we approached the forestry department, and they allotted us a 25m X 15m space where we set up a garden. There are eleven members in our group including me, and all of us do the sowing, weeding, harvesting etc. Two to three times a week, we harvest the produce and share it equally among ourselves. My pregnant daughter-in-law now gets to eat a lot of vegetables, and during these eight months, she has not been troubled by any illness”, Ushatai informs through her videotaped interview.
Through these awareness programmes that Ushatai mentions, hand-washing and other healthy practices too were urged as were vermicomposting and other self-sustaining agricultural practices.
Three years ago, MSSRF began with an anthropometric and nutritional status survey. Another survey now after these years of incremental changes will throw up clear data to reveal if malnutrition and hunger have indeed taken a hit.
But the anecdotal evidence narrated by villagers like Ushatai Kourati does give a hint about the results.
And fired by all this nutritional awareness, many of these village men and women have become ‘community hunger fighters’. Trained at the village level, they now spread the message of nutrition, one conversation at a time.