Indian Organic Cotton Farms

Indian Organic Cotton Farms Female: Much of the clothing we wear is made of cotton. Most cotton farmers use polluting chemicals. Cotton farms take up just 2.5% of the world’s farmland but use 10% of all pesticides and 22% of all insecticides produced annually, according to the British Government. This can have an impact on people’s health. According to the World Health Organization 20,000 people die every year from pesticide poisoning. But here in Gujarat, in North West India, some farmers are turning away from chemicals and switching to organic cotton production. According to the Gujarati Government 5,000 of the more than 100,000 cotton farmers here are now growing organic cotton. In part they switch because of health concerns but they also get a guaranteed minimum price for their cotton when prices are down. Khima Sodha and his family of six run a small five hectare farm near the town of Rapar in the district of Kutch. Five years ago he stopped using chemicals on his land. Khima Sodha: Five years ago we farmed using chemicals and in that time we had input costs for chemical pesticides and, also we were not getting a good enough price. Now we are getting great benefit from organic farming. Female: Modern organic farming is a combination of traditional and new methods. Instead of synthetic chemicals, Khima uses his own natural insecticide with pods from the akkdo cactus which are beaten into a milky pulp then combined with leaves from the Neema tree, cow’s urine and buttermilk. All is left to ferment for a couple of weeks and then spread over the crops. In tandem with this, Khima uses modern pheromone traps to catch bugs. The absence of chemicals attracts natural predators like birds. Here you can tell an organic field by the sound; it’s alive with birdsong. Instead of fertilizers farmers use plenty of manure. In this area of Kutch there are more livestock than people. Trained in modern composting techniques, the muck spreading is more efficient and effective. It takes three years of farming without chemicals before a farm is declared organic. Agrocel, a commercial company, provides training, advice, marketing, distribution and reinvestment for over 4,000 cotton farmers here in Gujarat as well as 45,000 small farmers throughout India. The company helps farmers through the transition to organic guaranteeing a minimum fair price for the cotton. They add a fair trade premium of two rupees for every kilo produced to help fund community projects like better water supplies. For the farmers water is their most precious resource and this newly dug reservoir supports the surrounding farms and three villages. There’s also now a clean water supply, a library for the local school and solar street lighting. Hasmukh Patel: Farmers are getting assurance they will get minimum Fairtrade support price before sowing their crop and at the end whatever they are selling they are getting Fairtrade premium, that premium will take care of all development of entire society right from the environmental, educational, health and all development of society. Female: The question is what are the advantages to the farmer of moving to organic production? The yields from organic cotton farming match those of conventional cotton production when harvests are good according to a recent study. In leaner times organic farmers tend to produce more. At first the input costs to organic farmers are comparable to non-organic cotton - though they drop over time. Prices too are similar although organic farmers are guaranteed a minimum of 21 rupees/hectare even if cotton market prices drop to as little as 18 rupees per hectare. Hasmukh Patel: We recruit more and more farmers, we train them and for them we start our farmers training school as well as establishing very good system, so we start with small scale and now we enter big scale and it is a matter of management and systems, so can say with good management and systems, then we can go for large scale also. Continuously you can say on average we can maintain our 40% growth every year and the last few years I can say more than 100% growth in organic as well as fair trade farming. Future I can say big retailers and small entrepreneurs both are very much interested in our business and I can say the sky is the limit.