Guyana urged to use natural agricultural practices

– Mauritius High Commissioner says it could help reduce NCDs

By Samuel Sukhnandan

Guyana is being encouraged to use low-cost home-made fertiliser which produces high-quality fruits and vegetables, as it could help to reduce many illnesses among the general population.
Mauritius High Commissioner in India, Jagdishwar Goburdhun, who grows his own fruits and vegetables, says natural agriculture is the best way to conduct farming.
Goburdhun, who represents research development movement that encourages natural agricultural practices, said Guyana should adopt the Zero-Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) technique, which was introduced and used in several states in India.
He feels with this form of inexpensive agricultural practice being used, it could help in a large way to reduce the widespread pandemic of noncommunicable diseases (NDCs).
“No chemicals, no pesticides, only natural farming. That is the best technology and cheapest and good for the farmers. Most times farmers are poor, and that will make them rich. Not only rich for themselves, but at the same time keep us healthy and we won’t have these diseases and the budget of the Ministry of Health will decrease,” he stated.
Goburdhun who is in Guyana for a visit said the practice being encouraged by his movement has been adopted in several major states in India and in Mauritius.
He said that international organisations like the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have already called for less use of chemicals and pesticides in agricultural practices, and have warned about the dangers in using these chemicals on fruits and vegetables.
“All the information and statistics we have… formerly we hadn’t much NDCs. But since we have inherited chemical plantations, that has increased. And we are sending billions and billions of insecticide in the ground, and that continues to become more serious,” he added.
ZBNF is a set of farming methods, and also a grassroots peasant movement, which had initially spread to various states in India, and is now being talked about throughout the world.
This was developed by Subhash Palekar, a farm philosopher from Maharashtra, India, has been generating interest in a large number of farmers across the country. All crops in the world can be cultivated through ZBNF, including coffee, areca, coconut and sugarcane.
For 13 years, while they were practising chemical farming, the agriculture production was on a continuous rise. However, after 1985, it began to decline. Disappointed with the declining yield, Palekar then began his quest for an alternative method to chemical farming. He realised that it was false premises of chemical farming on which Green Revolution was based, one Indian newspaper reported.
Resolute to find an alternative, Palekar began his relentless research, which continued for six years, on the natural processes of vegetation in the forests. He experimented with the observations made on his own farm, and eventually ended up with his ZBNF technique.
Having extensively studied the tribal forests of his state, he found that there is a self-nourishing, self-developing and a completely self-reliant natural system in the forests, by which all the vegetation and ecosystem exist without any external human intervention.
He suggested that this system could be replicated in the farms, discouraging the use of chemical fertilisers, HYV seeds and extensive irrigation techniques that were being promoted extensively during Green Revolution’s hay day.
ZBNF employs methods of farming wherein the cost of production and cultivation is zero. There is no application of fertilisers, insecticides and only 10 per cent of water is to be used for irrigation in comparison to conventional farming technique.
Instead, a culture is prepared, a fermented solution called jiwamrita (a combination of cow dung, cow urine, jaggery, gram flour, water and soil) that enables the micro-organisms to thrive and multiply faster. In addition to this, a carpet of the residue of harvested crops is to be spread between the crop rows, which absorbs moisture from the atmosphere and prevents the emergence of weeds.
After years of research with trials and errors, Palekar has homed in on the fact that it is only the locally available seeds, local breed of the cow and local soil that can be used in the preparation of this culture, making it essentially a self-sustainable, home-grown, no additional cost involving method.