Abstract
In this paper, I focus on the revival of an Indigenous community seed festival known locally as Burlang Yatra (‘Indigenous Biodiversity Festival’) in the district of Kandhamal in Odisha (India). This annual event brings together millet farmers to share knowledge and practices, including exchange of Indigenous heirloom seeds. Such community seed festivals remain largely underappreciated (and underexplored). Investigating Burlang Yatra through a social-ecological lens allowed for a greater understanding of its capacity to build and strengthen relationships, adaptation, and responsibility, three key principles that together link the social and the ecological in a dynamic sense. These principles, driven by intergenerational participation and interaction as well as social learning, can be seen as fostering ‘social-ecological memory’ of millet-based biodiverse farming. The festival’s persistence and revival illustrate a form of grassroots self-organising that draws on values of an Indigenous knowledge system. Within a restorative context, it has the capacity to repair and restore cultural and ecological relationships that the community has with their own foods and practices. This paper offers a new understanding of community self-organising from a social-ecological perspective and particularly in a marginalised context as supporting the revitalisation of Indigenous food systems.
Highlights
Local small scale and Indigenous food systems have been declining in developing countries under changing social-economic-political conditions primarily driven by the imperatives of agricultural industrialisation, commercialisation of crops, food globalisation, and urbanisation [1,2,3,4,5]
The ancient practice of rural community seed festivals, which had declined over the decades in Odisha, has re-emerged through collective local mobilisation of farmers supported by civil society action in the state
The analysis presented in this paper draws on a wider qualitative exploratory research study conducted in 2016–2017 on the revival of millet farming in Odisha
Summary
Local small scale and Indigenous food systems have been declining in developing countries under changing social-economic-political conditions primarily driven by the imperatives of agricultural industrialisation, commercialisation of crops, food globalisation, and urbanisation [1,2,3,4,5]. Provision of millets through the public distribution system (PDS) was included in India under the National Food Security Act, 2013 Against this context, the ancient practice of rural community seed festivals, which had declined over the decades in Odisha, has re-emerged through collective local mobilisation of farmers supported by civil society action in the state. Except for a few reports in media and civil society reflections on the significance of such festivals in the state (and elsewhere in the country) [28,32,33] for the survival of millets seeds/grains—revalorised as a source of food and nutrition for their medicinal or religious/spiritual values, for biodiversity, and for climate resilience—there has Sustainability 2020, 12, 1867 been little sustained reflection The persistence of these festivals over decades, albeit in a ‘marginalised’ form in recent times, and their current revival, suggest deeper connections to food systems than commonly acknowledged and, as such, deserve more attention. The key learnings from this paper and issues that warrant discussion and which underscore the need for further research are presented in the final section
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