Here is the full transcript of sustainable development leader Aruna Rangachar Pohl’s talk titled “A Snack’s Journey From The Farm To Your Mouth” at TED 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
You all had some tea? OK. Biscuits, perhaps? OK. So we all love biscuits, right?
Audience: Yes.
The Journey of a Biscuit
So join me now on a story and a journey of India’s — one of the most popular brands of biscuits. Let’s meet Devraj Pai, a small farmer who grows wheat on his one-hectare farm in arid Gujarat. This wheat is harvested and trucked 42 kilometers to a government marketplace, and there it is bought by a trader, who then sells it on 100 kilometers further to a commercial flour mill.
At the mill, it is stripped of all of its nutrients and fiber and then converted to refined flour. And then it is trucked another 400 kilometers further to a larger factory to be mixed with refined sugar, which has had a similar long journey. All of this is mixed with chemical preservatives, artificial flavors, and then baked into biscuits using energy-guzzling machines and then trucked 500 kilometers back to the same villages.
Now consider this. Devraj Pai sold his wheat for 22 rupees a kilo, and then he buys this stripped-down, sugary unhealthy biscuits for his family at 120 rupees a kilo, almost five times more. This is just the tip of the math iceberg.
Underneath lies the hidden world of margins at multiple points, fuel costs, infrastructure costs and another painful, unaccounted, hidden cost. The cost to nature. All this in the guise of modern efficiency and scale?
What the f– truck are we not seeing here?
The Bigger Picture
This is a tiny example of the highly polluting industrial farming model that is eating the world.
Let’s zoom out and view this. No escaping it.
India is the world’s most populous country, yet it is still pretty low, among the lowest in terms of per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Now, for an India under construction, rapidly modernizing, this is the fifth largest economy, shortly to be the fourth. For Indians on consumption steroids, it is third in terms of purchasing power parity.
A story of growth that is inexorably interlinked with global warming. How green is our current or future? As brown as my face, friends.
Contributing 20 percent to this browning of the planet is agriculture, with over half the country’s workforce engaged in it. Staring us in the face is this absolute imperative to power green production and empower green consumption. A daunting task for India’s 150 million small farmers who own less than two hectares of land.
A Personal Journey
Now I grew up in awe of nature as I tagged along with my civil engineer father in the deepest jungles of India. My mother, she taught me respect for Indigenous foods, cultures and the kinship of communities. A 25-year digression into the modern food industry.
Traveling the world was a roller coaster ride of the good, the bad, and the ugly of what the farmer grows to what lands up on a consumer’s plate. So my midlife crisis coincided with the climate crisis, and that motivated me to set up India Foundation for Humanistic Development with a vision to rejuvenate productive landscapes equitably and sustainably. We work with small farmers across India, as well as Indigenous communities in 22 states to promote natural farming, green enterprise development and habitat conservation.
I see my work as knitting, knitting a patchwork quilt of stories, of communities, their challenges, and the change makers and, you know, presenting this vibrant, multi-hued, expanding and evolving saga to the powers that be. And … I would like to now take you to a golden patch, as I zoom in, on a golden patch in Belgaum district of Karnataka in the south, where the heroes of my story are 10,000 small farmers.
A Green Production and Consumption Story
This story brings to life how green production can lead to green consumption in a more equitable and sustainable way. Let’s meet Anand. He’s a small farmer growing maize in Belgaum on a two-hectare farm.
Anand is also, you know, the proud managing director of the Saudati Farmer Producer Company Limited. Saudati Company has 1,000 farmers like our Anand, who are shareholders and co-owners. Their collective strength allows them to operate at scale, to raise finance, to bulk purchase farm inputs, to eliminate middlemen and then to trade directly with big buyers for higher prices.
By improving their farming efficiency, the Saudati farmers are earning at least 25 percent more and break away from high-interest micro loans that they needed before. They also get better-than-market prices for their produce from Anand and his team during season. Now, the profits from Saudati company are invested back into the company or distributed to the farmer shareholders at the end of the year, and this is a decision that is jointly taken.
How green is my valley? To know this, let’s visit the 1,000 co-owners of Saudati company, who are transitioning from a chemical-based monocrop agriculture to an organic, multi-crop farming system at scale through our natural farming trainings. We track and trace their production practices through an app called FoodSign, which allows us to capture the tons of carbon that is sequestered on their lands.
This is then traded to earn carbon revenues to create assets that would benefit the whole community. This could be a production facility, this could be a common warehouse or a primary health center, or even a drinking-water facility. Their decision.
Now it does pay to green production, right? Let’s now meet the heroines of my story who power the green production to green consumption pipeline.
Empowering Women and Local Economies
Meet Kamala and her 12-member self-help group, who are shareholders of Saudati. And they run a micro enterprise and yeah, they produce biscuits. Whole wheat and millet flour is mixed with jaggery.
A jaggery is an iron-rich brown sugar. This is baked in ovens that run on solar or biomass energy. Simply packed and sold locally.
Our Doorstep incubator program supports nine such farmer-producer companies, with 9,000 shareholders in Belgaum district who are linked to 150 micro enterprises, which are run by women and youth who just add value to local produce for local markets using renewable energy. Let’s step back and think a bit.
Do you see the simple, fantastic math happening here? A lone, two-hectare subsistence farmer transforms into this joint-venture of a 10,000 farmers managing 20,000 hectares of produce and earning multi-million rupees. A local circular food economy.
That has the impact to … benefit a whole district with a million population. Mind boggling, but doable. This scenario is something that can be repeated or replicated 100,000 times across India. And …
Secure the right to … affordable, sufficient and culturally appropriate food for a billion Indians. This is a reset button that connects culture to policy, and to reverse and repair a broken food system to a green and fair food system.
There are three things that underpin all that we do to let a thousand Belgaums bloom. One is a farming system that is climate-resilient, uses existing natural resources to improve productivity and farm incomes, just as our 10,000 farmers are showing us. Two, a production system that adds value close to source and conserves natural resources as well as allocates fair value to producer as well as consumer.
We do know, I think by now, that Camilla’s biscuits are surely tastier and healthier for our kids, right? Three. A value system that protects nature and people’s rights.
The ten farmer-producer companies with their communities in Belgaum are a living example of equitable ownership and joint decision making. In Sanskrit, India’s oldest language, we say (speaking Sanskrit). This means “the world is one family.”
A Call to Action
Showing up where and when it matters, sharing and caring is my family trait. For me, this means the world of food is in our collective hands. And we must, we should learn to value food from the lens of climate and communities.
You can do this. By connecting to the journey of food. And choosing what lands up in your shopping cart.