Vikram Doctor
With the Budget advanced this year by a few weeks, the season to lobby the finance minister for sops and favours has also been advanced. So since everyone else is doing this, I thought I might as well get my particular food-focused appeals in too. This is admittedly a bit unrealistic, but I should point out I have a track record (or just plain luck) from last year.
In a pre-Budget column, I suggested the FM consider support to 5 areas of particular food importance: millets, which for reasons of both nutrition and environmental suitability make much more sense for farmers in India than rice or wheat; fisheries, which should receive far more support given our long coastline; goats, whose rearing is rising rapidly, but not always with the best breeds or in sustainable ways; and organic farming, whose potential in India is huge, not least because this is where its principles were originally researched and codified by British agroscientist Sir Albert Howard.
And all these areas did, in fact, get support from Mr Pranab Mukherjee to the tune of Rs 300 crore each (with fish and goats combined under support for meat production). I would like to know how these funds were used, but for the moment let’s focus on what needs support now, and this year I have just one area to suggest: please, could Mr Mukherjee make budgetary provisions for bees.
TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE
Like all lobbyists, I have a personal interest here. For the last few years I've been on the board of a NGO – Under The Mango Tree (UTMT) – that promotes beekeeping for agricultural productivity and livelihood. This is unpaid (given how much honey I buy every time I visit UTMT, this actually involves significant loss) and while it may be questionable for journalists to get involved so directly in such efforts, I made an exception for UTMT, partly because Vijaya Pastala, who set it up, is not easily denied, but mostly because it really seemed to be trying to address the problem of the silos in which most foodrelated groups work. There are typically three silos.
One is the producers – many farmers and food producers may be making good products, but don’t consider larger environmental perspectives, nor how to make their food attractive and accessible by consumers. One example I heard of was of a goat milk cooperative. Goat milk should be more available, instead of just disappearing into the general milk supply as so-called Shecago milk (Sheep-Camel-Goat!). It can make great cheese, but this particular group was making cheese that was no different from standard processed cheese! And unrestricted grazing by goats can be a major environmental threat, and I don’t know if these producers were tackling that.
But environmentalists can exist in silos too, so insistent on what’s best for nature – or their definition of nature – that they ignore the needs of producers and consumers. This can be seen in how the promise of GM technology is not being rationally debated, its benefits noted and problems made clear in order to find solutions, but is instead being blocked with near religious fervour.
THE LOCAL GUY
In one limited area, UTMT is trying to bring all sides together. Beekeeping has two benefits - production of honey and pollination of plants, but in India the former has tended to dominate. Beekeepinghas generally been the preserve of professional apiarists, whose only aim is to increase honey production, for which they imported the European honeybee, Apis mellifera. This is the equivalent of importedcattle breeds whose milk yield is high, but whose unsuitability to Indian climate means that they require special feed and care, and still often fall sick, requiring antibiotic treatment that contaminates the milk supply.
A.mellifera only feeds on a few plants, which is why it is often cultivated by travelling beekeepers. They load their hives on lorries and take them to areas where suitable crops are to be found, and are allowed, or even paid, by the farmers of these crops who benefit from the pollination while the beekeeper gets the honey. This may seem neat, especially in the West, where you get huge acreages of single crops. But this isn't always the case in India, which means suitable crops for A.mellifera fall short, requiring beekeepers to feed the bees sugar, which takes the point away for consumers of the naturalness of honey. And the bees often fall sick, requiring antibiotics that a prominent study recently found in most commercial honey brands.
UTMT’s approach has been to focus on a native Indian bee, Apis cerana indica, which is not as productive as A.mellifera, but is much hardier and harvests from a much wider range of flora. This means it is ideal for producers like small farmers, and UTMT recently released a study showing that the benefits to them are huge – from pollination rather than honey. A researcher, Hemant Tripathi, lead a team in Valsad district in Gujarat from November 2010-March 2011 that studied and compared crop production in areas where bee boxes with A.cerana were installed and those without. The team actually sat in the field for ages, noting which plants the bees were visiting and how often, which Tripathi says led villagers to question their sanity!
MONEY BEES
But the results were startling. In areas with bee boxes, capsicum yield went up 227%, tomato 160%, cashew 157%, tur dal 133%, flat bean 128% and so on, down to smaller, yet still significant yields for brinjal (31%) and ridge gourd (27%) (the one mystery was a small decline in karela, but perhaps bees just don’t like this bitter plant!). Since they had observed the bees in action, and had non-bee pollinated areas for comparison, they knew this was not a fluke. Once installed in their hives, the bees required only little attention, but still produced a bonus of honey, in addition to the bumper crop. This honey could be eaten by the farmers, or sold in the market, where UTMT is happy to buy it, and sell it, nicely packed, in cities where it is finding many takers, since it is entirely natural Indian honey, with all the complex flavours of local plants.
This study was released by Usha Thorat, the ex-deputy governor of the RBI and currently vice-president of the Bombay Natural History Society, who was so struck by the results that she suggested several steps that the government could take to, like enlisting the many schemes that exist for women’s self-help groups to encourage beekeeping (in places like Himachal it has traditionally been a practice conducted by rural women). I hope this happens, but I can’t help thinking too of the benefits that might come if the FM makes special note of it in the Budget. Even more than the money, such budgetary nods are indications that the government recognises the importance of an issue, and beekeeping has so many combined benefits that it well deserves some madhu from Mr Mukherjee.
