The survey found that 1.1m urban farmers used wastewater for irrigation
Could this be part of the reason I’ve been so sick?
Urgent action is needed to remove pollutants from urban wastewater, which is often used in cities to grow food, an international study has warned.
Data collected by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) found that 85% of cities discharged the water without any appropriate treatment.
On first reading, the paranoia set in. But The Economist Green.view has a different, more encouraging take:
But Colin Chartres, the head of IWMI, is quick to point out that the report’s findings are not uniformly depressing. For one thing, in the cities surveyed, over 1m farmers make a living by growing crops in this way. Their earnings help support around 4.5m dependants. Worldwide, perhaps as many as 200m farmers rely on wastewater for at least some of their water.
This form of agriculture, it turns out, is especially beneficial to women. In some cities, women comprise more than 70% of the total number of farmers. Many also trade vegetables, and sell them wholesale. For those who worry about the status of women in the developing world, farming with wastewater looks like a good thing.
The environment benefits too. Spreading wastewater over fields, and allowing it to leach back through the soil into local waterways, turns out to be a reasonable way to purify it. The process filters out all the organic contaminants, and much of the nitrogen and phosphates that would otherwise contribute to algal blooms and dead zones further downstream. It is certainly preferable to dumping wastewater straight into the nearest big river or lake.
Ok, so feeling a little better…! Though I think in India the number of female farmers and vegetable vendors might be lower than in Africa. This paper excerpt not only illustrates the tricky nature of capturing women’s work, but also suggests that Indian women have a kind of behind the scenes approach to farming.
As observed earlier, the sample supports the generally held belief that farming in India is a male dominated profession and this fact is born out in our survey, where 32 were male and only 5 female farmers. From this data we may infer that in farming community male dominate as he is considered to be the head of the family; bread earner for the family is man, the whole family depends on him. However, when we investigated further, it was found that female may not own the land but they participate in all aspects of work and females take an active interest in their farms’ ploughing, cultivating and how to access finances.
In my search for info on female farmers, I came across this initiative by the Deccan Development Society to train rural women in filmmaking:
“We don’t know how to read or write, but we make our own films,” said Narsamma, 42, a farmer from Pastapur village in Hyderabad, introducing herself and her colleagues.
Narsamma is part of the Community Media Trust, an organization formed by 17 “dalit” women, the lowest group in India’s caste ladder, from Medak district in the Deccan plateau area of southern Andhra Pradesh state.
The Community Media Trust “is a response by women with multiple disadvantages of caste, gender and economic status, to the aggressive market globalization of today,” said their former tutor, P.V. Satheesh of the Deccan Development Society, at a presentation by the women for media persons in this city, earlier this month.
Media is an amazing thing. For more on DDS, click here. They have an interesting paper on “Gendering Agriculture“:
The women’s agricultural paradigm is marked by a process of humanisation of all things related to farming. Let me illustrate this with the epistomology of the women farmers of DDS:
- Let us start with the Earth. She is invariably referred to as Bhootalli [Mother Earth] by them. She is not a piece of real estate or a lifeless piece of grain producing machine. She is the Mother of life.
- From this point onwards the entire process of crop growth is seen by women in the same manner as the growth of a human child from the embryo stage.
- When the crops are in the podding stage, Bhootalli Pottatoni Undi, [Mother Earth is pregnant]
- When the grains are filling Paalu taagutindi [they are being breastfed]
- When they are mature, they are Pottakochindi [ready for delivery]
The examples are umpteen. But they all point to one thing. Women farmers look at the entire farming process as a cycle of life. Food is produced in a cyclical and nurturing process of birth, growth, maturity and regeneration. This vision is as different from the vision of the Green Revolution agriculture as chalk is from cheese. This is the paradigm that women are presenting to us. This challenges some of the key principles held up by the industrial agriculture and the science on which it is based.
