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Organic and beyond: can 'going organic' save India's besieged cotton farmers? Not on its own, argues Richard Swift, as he sorts through the evidence.

Article Excerpt
Anil Gupta is a professor at India's most prestigious management institute. He's a key player in an impressive array of Ahmedabad-based appropriate technology organizations, like the Society for Research for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI) and the National Innovation Foundation (NIF). They run something called The Honeybee Network, with its own newsletter bringing together eco-theorists and practitioners.

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We meet in his office on the modern Ahmedabad campus. Gupta bubbles over with enthusiasm about the genius of rural India. For him, the failures of the formal sector have left gaps in which indigenous science has had a chance to develop. He points to the work of SRISTI in first documenting and then patenting and helping develop a plethora of farmer-based inventions. He is obviously a man who carries a lot of intellectual weight with his co-workers, who hang on his words. He points to the simple cotton khadi that he wears, as a way of indicating both its comfort in the blistering heat and his faith in the future of the fabric.

There is a beautiful simplicity in the non-chemical bio-controls of organic production that has an immediate appeal. Gupta spins off example after example of how it might be done. Common-sense things, like spraying sugar on plants to attract ants that will eat the eggs of at least some cotton pests. It certainly sounds a little simpler, less expensive and dangerous than dousing the crops several times with pesticide each growing season. Gupta believes that a whole arsenal of these kinds of controls, in combination with the scientific innovation carried out by SRISTI, can provide an alternative model for cotton agriculture. Dr Vipin Kumar, the Chief Co-ordinator...

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