Capturing the Narratives of Sustainable Farming: Study of Marginal Women Farmers in Five Districts of Odisha

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of field research on sustainable farming practices in five districts of Odisha, that have emerged as a response to the adversities created by modern industrial agriculture and agribusiness market. The capital and chemical-intensive farming have left a legacy of irreparable environmental damage; and the monocultures have led to the gradual disappearance of a variety of indigenous crops, causing erosion of the seed sovereignty.1The first section of the article engages with the critique of increasing monopolisation of the food and farming systems, secured in a systematic and structured way by the forces of global agribusiness conglomerates. The second section captures the initiatives in which marginal women farmers are trying to revive seed saving and natural farming that had been lost due to the green revolution. These field investigations illuminate the exemplary ways in which such initiatives are empowering women farmers and enabling them to reclaim food security2and seed sovereignty in the current milieu of agrarian distress. Such grassroots engagements show the possibility of emancipatory politics outside the formal institutional framework that are structuring the alternative discourse rooted in local agroecology.3