CLIMATE CHANGE - India's Farmers Dealing With Seawater Flooded Fields

"Struggling Farmers in India Find Promise for the Future in Ancient Seeds" PBS Newshour 6/13/2013

Excerpt

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour):  And, next, we resume our weeklong look at food security and how climate change is affecting what we produce and how we eat.

Tonight, special correspondent Sam Eaton reports from India on how farmers are turning to ancient seeds to keep their crops viable in the future.

It's part of our series “Food for 9 Billion,” in partnership with Public Radio International's "The World," Homelands Productions, American Public Media's Marketplace, and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

SAM EATON:  On May 25, 2009, Cyclone Aila slammed into the Ganges River delta on the coast of Bangladesh and India.  Hundreds of thousands fled as the storm surge tore through earthen embankments and flooded rice fields with a wall of seawater.

I traveled to Eastern India with ecologist Asish Ghosh to see how the more than four million people living in this vast river delta are adapting to the salty soils the storm left behind.  It's been four years since the cyclone hit.  And farmer Raj Krishna Das says growing enough food is still a struggle.

ASISH GHOSH, Director, Center for Environmental Development, Kolkata:  So he even cannot have any vegetables growing after Aila because still -- still there is salt in the soil.

SAM EATON:  This is what climate change looks like for the densely populated river deltas of the world.  They hold some of the most productive farmland on the planet.  But it's also some of the most threatened.

ASISH GHOSH:  We have lost this amount of land on all sides of the island.

SAM EATON:  Today, this delta coastline is retreating more than 600 feet a year, and the salt is encroaching even farther inland.  As farmers here adapt to rising sea levels and more powerful storms, they become a case study for how to produce food on a warming planet.

Significant excerpt:

SAM EATON:  In even the remotest parts of India, the green revolution caused many farmers to abandon their traditional seeds for the modern high-yielding varieties promoted by the government.  But for those who didn't, the benefits of these locally adapted seeds are becoming more and more pronounced; 64-year-old farmer Looknath Nauri grows 30 different traditional varieties of rice, millet, corn, squash and lentils on his two-acre plot in Eastern India.

His song is a celebration of the diversity of traditional seeds and the happiness it brings to his family and his land.  These seeds, created over thousands of years, don't just have the genes to withstand droughts and floods.  They're also adapted to local soils and pests, eliminating the need for costly nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides.  Some are so resilient, they sprout even in the dry months.

MAN:  Look at this pearl millet.  We cut it last December.  There hasn't been any rain for five months.  And it's sending up new shoots.  This would never happen with a high-yielding variety.  Once the rains come, we don't even have to reseed it.  It just grows back by itself for two to three years.

SAM EATON:  Nauri says he tried the new rice seeds, but his harvest didn't even come close to the traditional varieties.

More prof that Mother Nature knows what she's doing.