On average, women in self-help groups in a small fishing town in Tamil Nadu make about 80 dollars each month; it is just about enough to sustain fisher families, who receive free housing from the Indian government. Credit: Nachammai Raman/IPS

By Nachammai Raman
NAGAPATTINAM, India, Feb 12 2015 (IPS)

Geeta Selvaraj and a few other women take turns to prepare meals with just one large gas cooker in a tiny shop.

The piquant smell of masala wafts out to the crowded street to mix with plumes of vehicle exhaust and tantalize customers, who are mostly from the surrounding area of Nagapattinam, a predominantly fishing town in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

“We want self-help groups to be a tool to transform women into individual entrepreneurs. We want to build self-reliant communities." -- Senthil Kumar, reporting and monitoring officer for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
Selvaraj’s income from her catering business has doubled over the last few years as her fisherman husband’s shrinks. “The men are not going out to sea like before,” she tells IPS, but she seems to have come to terms with this reality. “Because we [women] work, we don’t have to ask anyone for money and it helps with the household expenses.”

India is a major supplier of fish in the world and the industry employs an estimated 14.5 million people. The sector contributes about one percent of the country’s total GDP. Nagapattinam’s long coastline makes fishing its second most important industry after agriculture. According to the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, there are roughly 90,000 fishermen in what it calls the ‘fisheries capital’ of Tamil Nadu.

Traditionally, the women in the fishing community in this region stay at home or sell the fish their husbands bring back. But over the past few years, fishermen have been putting out to sea less often because of the scarcity of fish near the Indian coast and the fear of being caught by the Sri Lankan navy if they stray into the island’s territorial waters.

So, women in the community have stepped into the breach to provide for their families. They’re doing this by starting micro-enterprises and they’re the happier for it.

“Besides an income, it gives me a chance to get out of the house and interact with other people and know a little bit about what’s going on in the world,” says Selvaraj.

Micro-enterprises bring big changes

Nagapattinam district has a population of some 1.6 million people and a sex ratio of 1,025 women to 1,000 men. So, women form an important part of all development strategies in the district.

In a bid to weave women into the economic fabric of the region, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is assisting a Post-tsunami Sustainable Livelihood Programme that has given rise to thousands of micro-enterprises in the region, known locally as self-help groups.

IFAD, which is a specialised agency of the United Nations, is working with the local government. The goal is to establish at least 12,000 micro-enterprises in six coastal areas in Tamil Nadu by 2016.

Between 9,000 and 10,000 are already in operation now.

“We want self-help groups to be a tool to transform women into individual entrepreneurs. We want to build self-reliant communities,” says Senthil Kumar, who is the IFAD Reporting and Monitoring Officer for the programme in Tamil Nadu.

Since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, fishing in the coastal areas of Tamil Nadu has taken a big hit. The damage to the fishing industry was about 4.8 billion rupees (about 65 million dollars).

Prior to the disastrous tsunami, fishing was considered a lucrative activity by the standards here. Fishermen on average could make about 300 dollars per month. Now, they say it’s whittled down to half of that.

Firstly, it was because the fishermen had lost their boats and nets. The government offered compensation to about 17,672 affected fishermen, but even after all the equipment was repaired or replaced, the industry did not rally to its pre-tsunami days.

Then, fishermen claim, there’s less fish near the Indian coast since the tsunami, which makes them sail into Sri Lankan waters for a better catch. But the Sri Lankan Navy impounds their boats and detains the fishermen. In the past few months, this has turned into a contentious issue between the Indian and Sri Lankan governments.

“More than 80 boats have been caught by the Sri Lankan navy,” says Govindaswamy Vijayan, a fisherman who owns two fishing boats. “Today we need bigger boats to avoid crossing the international border into Sri Lankan waters and sail out to deep sea. But most fishermen can’t afford them.”

Sustainable plans to sustain fisher communities

With fewer men putting out to sea in the primarily fishing town of Nagapattinam in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, women are stepping into the breach through micro-enterprises. Credit: Nachammai Raman/IPS

The IFAD programme was created with a view to making coastal communities less dependent on fishing. However, as the men in the community refused to consider other trades, the prime beneficiaries of the programme have turned out to be women.

Women’s self-help groups were already burgeoning in the district after the tsunami as a means of income generation.

“When there’s a disaster, women are expected to care for the family. Feeding the children or other family members becomes their first concern and they immediately start getting involved in various activities,” says Vasudha Gokhale, a Pune-based professor at the BN College of Architecture who has studied how women in Tamil Nadu’s coastal areas coped with the tsunami.

But not all these self-help groups were successful because government officials chose their core activities. “Many of the women started micro-enterprises that they had little affinity for,” says Madhavan Krishnakumar, who works for a non-governmental organisation called Avvai Village Welfare Society.

Some of the micro-enterprises that fizzled out were involved in making plastic doors, bricks and candles. Their products were initially sold under the ‘Alaimagal’ brand.

“The government gave them funding incentives, but their entrepreneurial skills were not properly developed. They were not able to do the marketing or face professional competition, so they failed,” Krishnakumar explains.

A few NGOs such as the People’s Development Association were also involved in developing micro-enterprises in the district earlier on, but have now limited themselves to skills training for youth, according to its director, Joe Velu.

“There were too many people doing it. There was a lot of duplication and overlap. We felt it was becoming too much like moneylending.”

When IFAD came into the picture six years ago, the first thing they did was to conduct a survey. “We wanted to stabilise the movement,” says Kumar. “We graded self-help groups based on their performance and found the weaknesses that needed to be addressed to make the groups viable. Then we restructured the weak ones.”

Sufficient earnings, big savings

On average, the women in these self-help groups can take home about 5,000 rupees (about 80 dollars) per month, which a family of four can just about manage on thanks to the provision of free housing for fisher folk affected by the tsunami.

Revathi Kanakaraj belonged to a self-help group that was formed as far back as 2000, but it disintegrated after the tsunami. Then three years ago, she joined a new one under the IFAD umbrella. She finds it rewarding. “I’ve learned about micro-credit and I’ve learned about savings,” she tells IPS.

Financial literacy is one of the key components of the IFAD-assisted livelihood programme because its ultimate aim is to enable women to access credit on their own and encourage the habit of saving. “Previously, women in self-help groups didn’t know about interest rates and banking. But they’re managing their money very well now.”

The Tamil Nadu government reports that self-help groups across the state had a total savings of around 34 billion rupees (543 million dollars) as of 2012. Most of the women interviewed say they contribute between 20 and 120 rupees (0.32-1.92 dollars) per month.

Kasturi Ravi used to look forward to her husband’s return to shore and a nice income from the sale of the fish he had caught. But on Boxing Day ten years ago, her husband was washed back to shore dead in the devastating tidal waves that killed more than 6,000 people here, the worst affected district in India.

As she cleans dried fish for packing in a small salty-smelling shed with other members of her self-help group, she remembers how difficult it was to eke out a living after her husband’s death. She’s proud of where she is now.

She makes an average of four dollars per day. Although not a lot, it’s enough for subsistence. “I’m grateful for this because I can stand on my own feet,” she tells IPS.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Using bio-fertilizers, farmers in Tamil Nadu are reviving agricultural lands that were choked by salt deposits in the aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami. Credit: Jency Samuel/IPS

By Jency Samuel
NAGAPATNAM, India, Jan 7 2015 (IPS)

Standing amidst his lush green paddy fields in Nagapatnam, a coastal district in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a farmer named Ramajayam remembers how a single wave changed his entire life.

The simple farmer was one of thousands whose agricultural lands were destroyed by the 2004 Asian tsunami, as massive volumes of saltwater and metre-high piles of sea slush inundated these fertile fields in the aftermath of the disaster.

“The general perception is that organic farming takes years to yield good results and revenue. But during post-tsunami rehabilitation work [...] we proved that in less than a year organic methods could yield better results than chemical farming." -- M Revathi, the founder-trustee of the Tamil Nadu Organic Farmers' Movement (TOFarM)
On the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, Ramajayam had gone to his farm in Karaikulam village to plant casuarina saplings. As he walked in, he noticed his footprints were deeper than usual and water immediately filled between the tracks, a phenomenon he had never witnessed before.

A few minutes later, like a black mass, huge walls of water came towards him. He ran for his life. His farms were a pathetic sight the next day.

The Nagapatnam district recorded 6,065 deaths, more than 85 percent of the state’s death toll. Farmers bore the brunt, struggling to revive their fields, which were inundated for a distance of up to two miles in some locations. Nearly 24,000 acres of farmland were destroyed by the waves.

Worse still was that the salty water did not recede, ruining the paddy crop that was expected to be harvested 15 days after the disaster. Small ponds that the farmers had dug on their lands with government help became incredibly saline, and as the water evaporated it had a “pickling effect” on the soil, farmers say, essentially killing off all organic matter crucial to future harvests.

Plots belonging to small farmers like Ramajayam, measuring five acres or less, soon resembled saltpans, with dead soil caked in mud stretching for miles. Even those trees that withstood the tsunami could not survive the intense period of salt inundation, recalled Kumar, another small farmer.

“We were used to natural disasters; but nothing like the tsunami,” Ramajayam added.

Cognizant of the impact of the disaster on poor rural communities, government offices and aid agencies focused much of their rehabilitation efforts on coastal dwellers, offering alternative livelihood schemes in a bid to lessen the economic burden of the catastrophe.

The nearly 10,000 affected small and marginal farmers, who have worked these lands for generations, were reluctant to accept a change in occupation. Ignoring the reports of technical inspection teams that rehabilitating the soil could take up to 10 years, some sowed seed barely a year after the tsunami.

Not a single seed sprouted, and many began to lose hope.

It was then that various NGOs stepped in, and began a period of organic soil renewal and regeneration that now serves as a model for countless other areas in an era of rampant climate change.

The ‘soil doctor’

One of the first organisations to begin sustained efforts was the Tamil Nadu Organic Farmers’ Movement (TOFarM), which adopted the village of South Poigainallur as the site of experimental work.

The first step was measuring the extent of the damage, including assessing the depth of salt penetration and availability of organic content. When it became clear that the land was completely uncultivable, the organisation set to work designing unique solutions for every farm that involved selecting seeds and equipment based on the soil condition and topography.

Sea mud deposits were removed, bunds were raised and the fields were ploughed. Deep trenches were made in the fields and filled with the trees that had been uprooted by the tsunami. As the trees decomposed the soil received aeration.

Dhaincha seeds, a legume known by its scientific name Sesbania bispinosa, were then sown in the fields.

“It [dhaincha] is called the ‘soil doctor’ because it is a green manure crop that grows well in saline soil,” M Revathi, the founder-trustee of TOFarM, told IPS.

When the nutrient-rich dhaincha plants flowered in about 45 days, they were ploughed back into the ground, to loosen up the soil and help open up its pores. Compost and farmyard manure were added in stages before the sowing season.

Today, the process stands as testament to the power of organic solutions.

Organic practices save the day

Poor farmers across Tamil Nadu are heavily dependent on government aid. Each month the state government’s Public Distribution System hands out three tonnes of rice to over 20 million people.

To facilitate this, the government runs paddy procurement centres, wherein officials purchase farmers’ harvests for a fixed price. While this assures farmers of a steady income, the fixed price is far below the market rate.

Thus marginal farmers, who number some 13,000, barely make enough to cover their monthly needs. After the 90-135 day paddy harvest period, farmers fall back on vegetable crops to ensure their livelihood. But in districts like Nagapatnam, where fresh water sources lie 25 feet below ground level, farmers who rely on rain-fed agriculture are at a huge disadvantage.

When the tsunami washed over the land, many feared they would never recover.

“The microbial count on a pin head, which should be 4,000 in good soil, dropped down to below 500 in this area,” Dhanapal, a farmer in Kilvelur of Nagapatnam district and head of the Cauvery Delta Farmers’ Association, informed IPS.

But help was not far away.

A farmer named S Mahalingam’s eight-acre plot of land close to a backwater canal in North Poigainallur was severely affected by the tsunami. His standing crop of paddy was completely destroyed.

NGOs backed by corporate entities and aid agencies pumped out seawater from Mahalingam’s fields and farm ponds. They distributed free seeds and saplings. The state government waived off farm loans. Besides farmyard manure, Mahalingam used the leaves of neem, nochi and Indian beech (Azadirachta indica, Vitex negundo and Pongamia glabra respectively) as green manure.

Subsequent rains also helped remove some of the salinity. The farmer then sowed salt-resistant traditional rice varieties called Kuruvikar and Kattukothalai. In two years his farms were revived, enabling him to continue growing rice and vegetables.

NGO’s like the Trichy-based Kudumbam have innovated other methods, such as the use of gypsum, to rehabilitate burnt-out lands.

A farmer named Pl. Manikkavasagam, for instance, has benefitted from the NGO’s efforts to revive his five-acre plot of farmland, which failed to yield any crops after the tsunami.

Remembering an age-old practice, he dug trenches and filled them with the green fronds of palms that grow in abundance along the coast.

Kudumbam supplied him with bio-fertlizers such as phosphobacteria, azospirillum and acetobacter, all crucial in helping breathe life into the suffocated soil.

Kudumbam distributed bio-solutions and trained farmers to produce their own. As Nagapatnam is a cattle-friendly district, bio solutions using ghee, milk, cow dung, tender coconut, fish waste, jaggery and buttermilk in varied combinations could be made easily and in a cost-effective manner. Farmers continue to use these bio-solutions, all very effective in controlling pests.

“The general perception is that organic farming takes years to yield good results and revenue,” TOFarM’s Revathi told IPS.

“But during post-tsunami rehabilitation work, with data, we proved that in less than a year organic methods could yield better results than chemical farming. That TOFarM was invited to replicate this in Indonesia and Sri Lanka is proof that farms can be revived through sustainable practices even after disasters,” she added.

As early as 2006, farmers like Ramajayam, having planted a salt-resistant strain of rice known as kuzhivedichan, yielded a harvest within three months of the sowing season.

Together with restoration of some 2,000 ponds by TOFarM, farmers in Nagapatnam are confident that sustainable agriculture will stand the test of time, and whatever climate-related challenges are coming their way. The lush fields of Tamil Nadu’s coast stand as proof of their assertion.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

An Indian voter reads a political pamphlet distributed during a rally of the Indian National Congress in Mumbai. Credit: Al Jazeera English/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Peter Custers
SECUNDERABAD, India, May 27 2014 (IPS)

Held in nine rounds over a period of several weeks, India’s national elections have been described as the most massive exercise in vote-casting worldwide.

The spectacle of witnessing some 814 million voters fan out among 935,000 polling stations that offered a choice between 1,600 political parties was undeniably exciting, but the results – when they were announced on May 16^th – came as an unpleasant shock for those who’ve long admired India’s secular political traditions.

Riding on the aspirations of India’s thriving urban middle classes, and lavishly supported by a booming corporate sector, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – which champions a Hindu-nationalist agenda – gained an absolute majority of parliamentary seats, making its controversial leader, Narendra Modi, India’s 15^th prime minister.

Even more troubling, some say, was that the the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) – the electoral coalition headed by the BJP – succeeded in bagging over three-fifths of all seats in the new Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament.

"While the [BJP] walked off with 282 out of 543 seats, its voter share was a mere 31 percent of the population, representing a discrepancy of more than 20 percent."
The once-invincible Congress Party, which ruled India for the last two consecutive terms, was virtually decimated, its share of parliamentary seats whittled down to just 44, a fifth of its former size.

A veritable media storm followed the announcement of the results, with conservative pundits extolling the BJP’s win as a “landslide”, and others bemoaning India’s descent into consolidated right-wing rule.

But a closer look at the voting patterns tells a story of persistent communalism in 21^st-century India, and suggests that elections in a country that has 1.2 billion people, over 120 linguistic groups, a sizeable proportion of adivasi (indigenous) people and a complex hierarchy of castes and sub-castes reflect, at best, a distorted democracy.

Dizzying diversity

While the Muslim minority constitutes some 17 percent of the country’s total population, they are poorly represented in the new parliament, having secured only 20 out of 543 seats.

Fearing the BJP’s track record of aggravating religious tensions, most Muslims refrained from casting in their favour, maintaining a safe distance from the NDA as well.

This was particularly true of Muslims in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which holds 80 seats in the Lok Sabha.

Here, the BJP’s electoral strategy had banked on both communalism and caste politics. In the state’s northern Bahraich region, for instance, the party sought to reach out to Dalits and other low-caste Hindus by reviving the memory of an 11^th century Hindu king, in the process direspecting the revered Muslim saint Ghazi Saiyyad Salar Masud whom the king had defeated in combat.

This, coupled with memories of gruesome communal riots that rocked the westen region of Muzaffarnagar last August and September – leaving nearly 100 dead and 40,000 displaced – resulted in Muslims giving the BJP and NDA candidates a wide berth.

Similar ghosts haunted other states as well, with memories of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the western state of Gujarat, which Modi ran as chief minister from 2001 to 2014, no doubt leading many people to refrain from voting for the BJP.

The BJP also received a cold shoulder in India’s populous southern states. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, the All India Anna Dravidian Progress Federation (AIADMK) led by Jayalalithaa won a landslide victory, seizing 37 of the state’s 39 seats while the BJP gained just one.

The Hindu nationalists were also trounced in the south-western state of Kerala and the two states of bifurcated Andhra Pradesh, the fifth-most populous region in India that boats a Hindu majority.

Karnataka is the one state in the south where the BJP has made significant inroads. Here, the concept of Hindutva – an ideology centered on Hindu supremacy – gained a foothold in the 1990s partly thanks to a communal campaign aimed at undermining the syncretic Hindu-Muslim worship at the 1,000-year-old old cave-shrine of the Sufi saint Dada Hayat.

In the past, Hindu nationalists mobilised to install images of a low-caste Hindu god in the shrine, and worked to undermine the position of the hereditary spiritual head of the shrine. Though loudly criticised, the campaign paid off. In the recent Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 17 out of the state’s 28 seats.

Votes versus seats: an electoral discrepancy

While much of the post-election commentary has focused on Modi’s sweeping win, few have unpacked the discrepancies between the number of seats secured by the BJP and the share of votes actually cast in their favour.

In what is referred to as India’s ‘first past the post’ system, electoral seats ultimately count more than votes, resulting in a huge gap between the BJP’s victory and its popularity among the majority of Indian voters.

While the party walked off with 282 out of 543 seats, its voter share was a mere 31 percent of the population, representing a discrepancy of more than 20 percent.

Similar figures from individual states are even more startling: various local newspaper reports point to some six states where the Hindutva party won a number of seats that, in percentage terms, was double or nearly double the share of votes it obtained.

In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, the BJP’s vote-share was only 42.3 percent, yet it secured 71 out of 80 seats. In Rajasthan, only 54.9 percent of voters chose the party, yet it bagged every single seat in the state. In New Delhi, its voter share was 46.4 percent, and here again it walked off with all Lok Sabha seats.

Similar discrepancies were registered for the central Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, as well as the eastern state of Jharkhand.

Another distorting factor was the extent of corporate funding towards the BJP’s electoral campaign, to the point that they alone could muster huge advertisements in the country’s newspapers, undertake prolonged online advertising (including the use of social media) and gain almost limitless access to television stations.

This sustained media campaign was not, however, accompanied by a countrywide groundswell of popular support for Modi; in fact, a safe majority of the electorate cast their ballots for parties that stood opposed to the BJP’s Hindutva politics.

These facts should act as encouragement for the AIADMK and other regional parties likely to form a joint opposition bloc in India’s new parliament.

Peter Custers is the author of ‘Capital Accumulation and Women’s Labour in Asian Economies’ (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012)

(END)

For half a century cardiovascular disease has been the largest killer in Western countries, but recently it has started to dominate the health statistics in the South as well. In India coronary heart disease is already the biggest killer, and strokes are about to rise to second place. Globally, cardiovascular disease now kills about 17 million people a year, and a growing number of people are having heart attacks or strokes as early as their 40s or 50s.

Risto Isomaki

This global pandemic has a number of complementary causes. People live longer, eat less healthy food, smoke more, and do less manual labour. More and more people are commuting to their jobs by metro, train, bus, or car instead of walking or cycling. The majority of the world’s population is breathing seriously polluted air from which small inhaled particles can move from lungs to other parts of the body, including the walls of our arteries where they become a part of the plaque built by bacteria. Reduced exposure to sunlight could also be a factor, because it reduces the amount of cholesterol that our skin will convert into to vitamin D.

However, the most important single reason for the global cardiovascular epidemic could be the growing use of unhealthy dietary oils and fats. The world currently consumes about 150 million tonnes of edible oils and fats per year. Of this, one-third is produced by a single species: the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), a prolific source of vegetable oil.

Unfortunately, almost 50 percent of palm oil is palmitic acid, which is one of the unhealthiest fatty acids for the heart and veins. Coconut oil, which provides another five percent of our edible oil, is even less healthy. According to official predictions, world consumption of edible fats and oils will rise to 300 million tons by 2030.

Most of the new demand comes from Asia, where the current per capita consumption of edible oils is only 50 percent of the present average in North America and Europe. At the moment it looks as if the vast majority of this increase will come from palm oil. Huge areas of clear-cut rainforest areas have been converted to oil palm plantations in Malaysia, Indonesia, and a number of other countries. Indonesia already has nine million hectares planted with oil palms, and companies have applied for permission to expand this to 35 million hectares.

Environmentalists have been horrified by these developments. Without the oil palms many of the logged areas could regenerate and grow back into rainforest. More than two million hectares of oil palm plantations have been established on deep peat soils, which causes significant carbon dioxide emissions from the oxidizing peat.

Yet the most significant public health aspect of the situation has received much less attention. If humanity triples or quadruples its consumption of palm oil, our present cardiovascular pandemic will explode. This could overload public healthcare systems and leave them far less time and fewer resources for dealing with poor people’s diseases.

The world needs vast quantities of healthier food oils to prevent what could otherwise become the worst public health disaster in human history. The healthiest food oils contain very little saturated and a high percentage of monounsaturated fatty acids. Polyunsaturated fats are, of course, healthier than saturated fats, but they are less stable than monounsaturated fats.

Many plants produce oil which has a lot of monounsaturated and only a little saturated fat, but two of them are especially important: the olive and the avocado. Up to 80 percent of olive oil consists of monounsaturated fat, which helps to keep the levels of good cholesterol up and the levels of bad cholesterol down.

According to some studies olive oil might even reduce women’s risk of getting breast cancer by 45 percent. Unfortunately, the world currently produces only three million tonnes of olive oil. The average yield is only 200 or 300 kilograms per hectare per year, but this hides huge production differences between countries and even farms.

Olive cultivation requires relatively cold winter temperatures. Because of this, the avocado tree could, or should, become the leading food oil plant in the tropical and subtropical regions. It originally comes from Mexico and the Amazon region, but has a very wide range. For example, in India avocados have been grown successfully both in the north, in the Himalayan foothills, and in the south, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

We already know that avocados grow well in many parts of Africa. According to Chinese agricultural scientists, the tropical and subtropical parts of China and Vietnam also contain tens of millions of hectares of hilly land that would be eminently suitable for avocados. Avocado oil is exceptionally stable and resists high temperatures even better than olive oil. In countries where people often fry food in oil, avocado oil might be the healthiest option. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Risto Isomaki is an environmental activist and awarded Finnish writer whose novels have been translated into several languages.