While Choosing Cabbages over Amaranth in August
I remember how the vegetable market in Vileparle used to look like 30 years back and can compare it with how it looks now. The current day vegetable market is known for the diverse and beautiful looking produce it offers. You can get all sorts of fruits and vegetables ranging from local varieties which are still grown in neighbouring Vasai to exotic Kiwi fruits imported from the New Zealand. Over the years there is a definite shift in what you can find there more commonly. E.g. in the month of August there used to be lot of amaranth leaves which has been replaced majorly by cabbages. Of course there is a change in the consumers as well. The women clad in nine yard sarees in the past have been completely replaced my modern moms wearing jeans these days. These women do not prefer amaranth leaves but cabbages and they get them in the market in the month of August. Isn’t it as simple as that?
It becomes more interesting after knowing that these modern moms get worried about the future of their kids after hearing stories of farmers putting pesticides in those cabbages. They could have tried to enquire how these cabbages arrived at those vegetable stalls in the month of August in the first place but most of them did not, since their choosy kids did not like Amaranth leaves anyway and did not have time to deal with their tantrums. Probably they remembered how their mothers forced them to eat Amaranth leaves in spite of the fact that as kids they also did not like to eat these themselves.
Well cabbage is a typically cool season crop for India. That means growing them in the month of August requires farmers from plains of India to fight a lot of odds. They have to use pesticides to kill insects, they have to use herbicides to keep away large number of weeds that grow naturally in the plot and pay higher price for the particular seed which can grow in that month. That increases the cost and that drives the price up. But still this is the cabbage that was demanded by the moms. Only if they could have looked a bit into how these cabbages have to be grown before asking for them they would have made a different choice. These choices not only get restricted to cabbages but extend to the mangoes that are desired in the month of February and the costly Chia seeds that got imported all the way from South America and many such similar things.
Gone are the days when majority of the farmers in the world cultivated their lands solely to meet their own demands. In the World the percentage of population dependent on agriculture has reduced from 43% to 28% in the last 20 years. I am mentioning especially World since we in India are fighting Corona virus that originated in China by remaining in our homes under lockdown while eating lentils probably grown in Canada. From hills of Konkan to the great plains of North America, farmers are growing crops which are meeting the ever increasing demands of the consumers which are spread across the world. Beyond pesticide load in the crops, there are larger issues of soil erosion, increased use of water, high requirements of energy and of course what we worry most about, the destruction of our forests for agriculture, which are driven by the need to meet the consumer demand.
What drives the consumer demands? Are the consumers making right choices? How can farmers deal with them while making agriculture more sustainable and still gaining on incomes? The larger questions need some larger pondering and of course resultant larger action taken ever.
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It becomes more interesting after knowing that these modern moms get worried about the future of their kids after hearing stories of farmers putting pesticides in those cabbages. They could have tried to enquire how these cabbages arrived at those vegetable stalls in the month of August in the first place but most of them did not, since their choosy kids did not like Amaranth leaves anyway and did not have time to deal with their tantrums. Probably they remembered how their mothers forced them to eat Amaranth leaves in spite of the fact that as kids they also did not like to eat these themselves.
Well cabbage is a typically cool season crop for India. That means growing them in the month of August requires farmers from plains of India to fight a lot of odds. They have to use pesticides to kill insects, they have to use herbicides to keep away large number of weeds that grow naturally in the plot and pay higher price for the particular seed which can grow in that month. That increases the cost and that drives the price up. But still this is the cabbage that was demanded by the moms. Only if they could have looked a bit into how these cabbages have to be grown before asking for them they would have made a different choice. These choices not only get restricted to cabbages but extend to the mangoes that are desired in the month of February and the costly Chia seeds that got imported all the way from South America and many such similar things.
Gone are the days when majority of the farmers in the world cultivated their lands solely to meet their own demands. In the World the percentage of population dependent on agriculture has reduced from 43% to 28% in the last 20 years. I am mentioning especially World since we in India are fighting Corona virus that originated in China by remaining in our homes under lockdown while eating lentils probably grown in Canada. From hills of Konkan to the great plains of North America, farmers are growing crops which are meeting the ever increasing demands of the consumers which are spread across the world. Beyond pesticide load in the crops, there are larger issues of soil erosion, increased use of water, high requirements of energy and of course what we worry most about, the destruction of our forests for agriculture, which are driven by the need to meet the consumer demand.
What drives the consumer demands? Are the consumers making right choices? How can farmers deal with them while making agriculture more sustainable and still gaining on incomes? The larger questions need some larger pondering and of course resultant larger action taken ever.
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