In Gangavaram village in the south Indian state of Telangana, G Anjamma alternates layers of cow-dung ash and fresh neem leaves in a basket. In each layer, she places seeds for long-term preservation. Then she seals it with cow dung and clay. “Seeds can be stored for up to three years this way,” she says. As the community seed banker of her village, her house is stacked with big barrels of these seed baskets. This is precious cargo, for all these seeds are indigenous and better suited for rain-fed farming, crucial in a region prone to droughts. Farmers, mostly Dalit, lower caste women from surrounding villages, source seeds from Anjamma. “There is no guarantee how seeds from the market will grow. The market mostly sells commercial crops, and there is little variety,” she says, showing the several regional and national awards she had won for preserving biodiversity and sustainable use of natural resources.

Anjamma is part of a movement led by 5,000 women initiated by the Deccan Development Society (DDS) in 1983. Women farmers gather in ‘sanghams’, groups of varying sizes, to learn sustainable farming. They grow multiple heirloom crops instead of cash crops like peanuts and cotton which need expensive inputs of irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides. “This ensures we don’t have to buy anything from the market to keep our children and ourselves healthy,” says Anjamma. “Our survival also doesn’t depend on prices set by the market,” she adds. It has also ensured that she and other Dalit woman farmers are not at the mercy of government dole-outs, volatile market prices or vagaries wrought by climate change.

Their food and seed sovereignty has also given them resilience to survive the pandemic-induced economic crisis. The sustainable agricultural practices that women like Anjamma promote, allow farmers to practice multi-cropping.

“I grow 25 varieties of food crops in one acre. Even if ten fail, I still have enough to feed my family and sell the excess in the market,” says Mogullama, another Dalit farmer from the region.

The movement has now spread across 75 villages. Office bearers of DDS estimate that at least 5,000 acres in the district are free of chemical inputs. Every January since 2002, the society organizes a month-long biodiversity festival in which a parade of bullock carts showcases the variety of heirloom millets grown in the area.

The DDS model has been replicated in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Togo and elsewhere in Western Africa. “We started collaborating with women farmers in Africa as their geology and climate conditions are similar to those found in our region,” says CN Suresh from the society. DDS is also part of the All India Millet Sisters Network, launched in 2016, which promotes the use of millets amongst women farmers. In 2019, DDS won the Equator Prize for its holistic approach to climate change, food security, and empowering marginalised women and in 2020, the Society won the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation Award: “in recognition of the work of DDS women to rehabilitate degraded lands and promote biodiversity.”

Meanwhile, DDS’ annual festival this year has seen enthusiastic participation. “Even from men!” exclaims I Mollumma, a Dalit woman farmer and the official videographer for the festival. “Perhaps the pandemic has reminded them of the importance of preserving our indigenous biodiversity in farming…”

Author: Karthikeyan Hemalatha, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Karthikeyan Hemalatha

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Harvest time in Ghoryan, Western Afghanistan and, fingers moving balletically from petals to the baskets at their side, six women pickers chat beneath the folds of their hijabs. The purple flowers filling those baskets represent a means of keeping families fed and clothed in a country in which decades of war have left 15 percent of adult females widowed. Little wonder this novel crop has been locally nicknamed: ‘purple gold’.

Once the world’s biggest producer of raisins and pistachios, by the early 1990s most of Afghanistan’s fertile farmland had been turned over to the production of opium poppies. In a 2010 United Nations report, Afghanistan was found to be the source of 93 percent of the world’s opiates, a trade then representing 46 percent of the nation’s GDP and the principal source of funding for insurgents who have for decades terrorised Afghanistan’s population, including the Taliban. In addition to this grim legacy, opium poppies are a water-intensive crop that has diminished Afghanistan’s soil quality and water table even as global warming puts this semi-arid nation at greater risk of drought.

Enter the The Afghan Women’s Saffron Association (AWSA). Launched in 2011, membership of this all-female cooperative of saffron growers now numbers in the tens of thousands. In a market tightly controlled by male merchants, the association works to achieve fair rates for women cultivators, selling directly to saffron consuming markets in the rich world and, through community outreach programmes, incentivising the transition from opium poppies to saffron by offering advance payments for seed purchasing and to fund heaters to dry the stamens that, too fragile for mechanical methods, need to be picked by hand.

The growers, says AWSA founder Sima Gharvani, have nature on their side. The most prized variety of saffron crocus, the fragrant Negrin, tolerates Afghanistan’s dry winds yet, compared to the opium poppy, is modest in its water consumption. It’s also far more lucrative than that illicit plant, with saffron commanding US$18per gram in global markets, compared to the US$0.10 per gram for opium resin. It is thought this women-led co-operative could be replicable in other drug-war torn global regions in which opium growing is rife, such as Mexico and Columbia.

The association has been a lifeline for women such as Afarin, a 29-year-old who lost her husband in the 2007 Taliban insurgency. In deeply conservative Afghanistan society, widows are stigmatised: considered bad omens at family gatherings and controlled by a strict social code that forbids them from wearing bright colours and laughing in public. Before gaining work in saffron picking and processing via the Ghoryan Women Saffron Association, a regional offshoot of AWSA, Afarin relied on family charity and overseas food aid to feed her three children, two boys and a girl aged 7 to 11. Today, however, she can afford to send her oldest child to school and cover her diabetic mother’s medical bills. “Without the association my children would be hungry,” she says. “Now my life is better. I like coming to work on the harvest; I have made good friends here.”

As in many developing nations, Covid 19 has been a challenge for Afghanistan. The nation lacks healthcare infrastructure and 44 percent of all Afghans, according to the World Food Program (WFP), rely on livelihoods that have been disrupted by the outbreak of Covid-19. In Ghoryan at least, this year’s harvest is a good one and Afarin is hopeful the Negrin crocus, as well as peace, will continue to bloom in Ghoryan. “We take life a day at a time,” Afarin says. “But when I look at a field of flowers, I smile.”

Afghan Women’s Saffron Association (AWSA) saffron can be bought at https://www.facebook.com/NeginSaffron/

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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“How many lives has this purse saved?” says Isatou Ceesay, 48, toting a pretty, pale blue woven handbag.

Raised in Njau, a humble village in The Gambia, from a young age Ceesay was struck by the environmental degradation caused by the overuse and poor disposal of waste. The rivers in her rural region of the West African state were clogged with plastic bags, with the burning or dumping of toxic waste leading to a host of health implications for her fellow villagers, from respiratory illnesses to cholera, as well as sickening the livestock communities depended upon.

“The idea of recycling came to me very young, when I looked at the environment I lived in and people didn’t have the idea of taking care of their waste, “Ceesay says. “People were simply not aware of what I was talking about.” But Ceesay had social barriers to overcome in making the villagers understand the benefits of good environmental custodianship. “I was very young, I lacked money and I was uneducated,” Ceesay says. “But one thing I did have was commitment.” Plus, she adds, with a smile: “I wanted to prove them all wrong.”

What a difference two decades make. Today Ceesay’s revolutionary community recycling project, Njau Recycling and Income Generation Group (NRIGG), employs 1,100 people in four separate communities in the Gambia. The project proceeds on the basis that many of the items that are poorly disposed of by Gambian communities have reuse value. Using novel crafting methods, NRIGG employs marginalised women to make recycled bags, mats, purses and jewellery for resale at markets or via the charity’s site from reclaimed items, including plastic bags, and the plastic bottles that are the scourge of local waterways. The organisation also trains unemployed women to be community waste and recycling experts, training villagers in composting and recycling, kitchen gardening and the societal benefits in planting trees. This advocacy work, Ceesay says, has improved child and maternal weight and wellbeing in the communities her organisation works with. “When I return to a village and see there are vegetables growing, the environment is clean and nutrition has improved, that’s the best thing for me,” Cessay says.

NRIGG is now turning its attention to forest preservation, perfecting a simple method of making compacted cooking fuel from discarded kindling and coconut shells to prevent deforestation for charcoal. “This is important,” Ceesay says. “Without forests we cannot have a healthy life.”

For Ceesay, social justice goes hand-in-hand with good environmental stewardship. “If women and young people are not part of this work it will not have a future,” she says. She has recently launched a project that gives recycling work to disabled Gambian women who otherwise have little option but to beg. “They are some of the best workers we have,” she says, “but society sees them as having no worth.” Now Ceesay’s dream is to see more women taking leadership positions in African countries. “That is something we are really lacking,” Cessay says.

Apart from Ceesay, of course. In 2012, the environmental trailblazer was recognised with an award at The International Alliance for Women Difference Maker award in the USA. In her homeland, she’s popularly nicknamed the Queen of Recycling, a moniker she doesn’t mind one bit. “When I wake up every day I still have the heart to deliver a better life,” she says.

Isatou Ceesay was photographed for Climate Heroes, a documentary series about the women and men around the world who fight to protect our environment and mitigate climate change, climateheroes.org.

Learn how to recycle plastic bags into purses with Njau Recycling’s technique: Watch Here
Buy their creations at  One Plastic Bag

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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