Overcoming Hunger: Community-Based Food Security
 Anjamma, a sangham member, and some of her traditional food crop seeds, Andhra Pradesh, India. |
Inter Pares staff are actively involved in the Food Security Policy Group (FSPG), a Canadian coalition of non-governmental organizations, farmers, and producers' groups who share an interest in promoting international food security policy. Part of Inter Pares' work is to popularize and promote local initiatives that successfully increase food security and eradicate hunger. Staff member Anna Paskal recently visited India to document examples of community-based food safety net systems. This is her account of that experience.
The parched landscape of the semi-arid Deccan Plateau in India's southern state of Andhra Pradesh looks like a hard place to grow anything - at least to the uninitiated. For decades, vast areas of this state have been part of India's "Hunger Belt", a large swathe of the country that routinely experiences food shortages leading to chronic malnutrition. A country with a population of more than one billion people, enjoying unprecedented economic growth, India is also home to over 320 million people who regularly experience hunger. At the same time, the government stockpiles tens of millions of tons of wheat and rice, some of it over fifteen years old, intended for emergency food aid and as subsidized rations for low-income citizens.
Two years ago, there was an extended drought in Andhra Pradesh. On the Deccan Plateau, the cracks in the earth opened up into ravines. Crops withered and died in the heat. The state approached the federal government and asked for emergency food from the country's stockpiles. At the same time, in Medak District, an area inhabited largely by Dalit or "untouchable" caste families, women leaders met to assess whether emergency food assistance was needed. Women from village after village said they had no need for external food - what they had grown in their own villages was enough.
I was in Andhra Pradesh to find out more about how some of the state's poorest citizens had achieved the greatest food security in a time of food scarcity. In Hulgera village, I sat with Sushilamma and six other members of the local sangham, or village women's group. Developed with the help of a non-governmental organization called Deccan Development Society (DDS), the sangham members work together to develop local projects and mobilize citizens to have a voice in the decisions that affect their communities.
Sushilamma explained to me that in the past her family and others were forced to leave their villages for several months each year, building temporary huts on the edges of nearby towns, to work as day labourers. Wages were extremely low and they barely managed to survive. They often had to borrow money from moneylenders at usurious interest rates, effectively transforming some borrowers into bonded labourers, who then had to work on the moneylenders' farms at key times of the agricultural calendar. This meant that families could not invest time growing food on their own small plots, thus driving people into a vicious cycle of ever increasing debt. The villagers felt that if they could bring their own fallow land back under cultivation, they could break free of the moneylenders, and stop the seasonal migration that created tremendous hardship.
With initial support from DDS, villagers invested in animal manure, and spent time working their land. Combining ecological techniques and local seed storage, the sangham members grew crops adapted to local conditions, and that would flourish using only rainwater. The use of organic agriculture meant many uncultivated food sources grew abundantly on and around the sangham fields, providing a diverse and nutritionally-rich source of green leafy vegetables and medicinal plants. At harvest time, the villagers kept some grain for their own consumption, and deposited the rest in their own Community Grain Bank to be distributed within the community during lean times.
Each year the grain bank food stocks have increased and migration has diminished. Over time, reliance on moneylenders has slowly disappeared, allowing the people of Hulgera to further invest in their own land, and their own future. This is why, when women leaders came together to assess emergency food requirements for their villages during the drought, they declared they had enough.
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