Going organic: Field notes from Sikkim

Three months ago I was in a town in south Sikkim to attend a workshop on climate change adaptation in the eastern Himalayas. I had flown in from Delhi and it was my first visit to Sikkim.

We arrived in the town of Namchi, located at a height of around 4,500 feet, late in the evening. I was tired and hungry and wanted to eat some heavy food. But what we were served in the hotel's dining hall was plain fare - two bland curries, some saag, and daal, with rotis and rice. As I put the food on the plate, a fellow journalist said that the ordinary-looking food was actually special - it was all organic, grown in farms nearby.

And tasting the dishes in curiosity, I realised they were different from what I had assumed. They were delicious. I felt satiated and I wondered why the same dishes back home tasted boring.

The next day, too, we were served organic dishes and I relished them again.

During the conference, I came to understand why people were only eating organic vegetables and pulses here. It was because the entire state was going organic. That meant farmers were not using any fertilisers or pesticides for crops - only manure made from dung, decayed leaves and dry grasses.

In fact, the urge to go fully organic was so intense with the Sikkim government that the changeover in farming techniques (from fertilisers to manure) had been labelled "a mission". More so due to a deadline that the state had set for itself to go fully organic - December 2015. In this mission was some form of coercion, too. It was a little baffling for me - so used to eating vegetables grown with all kinds of pesticides, in the outskirts of Delhi.

The organic village

On the second day, we visited a village named Perbing and saw the organic farms where vegetables such as potatoes, radish, cauliflowers and tomatoes were being grown on small plots with lots of love and care.

There, me and another journalist spoke to a group of Sherpa farmers and asked how much they earned in a year, selling vegetables. They said that it went up to Rs 4 lakh a year if the crops were good. It was hard to believe. We were sceptical and told them so. They said they did earn somewhere between 2-4 lakhs. "The harder you work, the more you make," one said.

Then the mystery was solved. Their produce, of say potatoes, was sold at prices almost 50 per cent higher than ordinary potato, usually grown downhill, in Siliguri.

So they earned far more for the same amount, as compared to a potato farmer in West Bengal.

As we walked around, we saw groups of men and women heading for the forest uphill, carrying massive baskets. Soon they returned, carrying dry leaves and grasses to be turned into natural manure.

The reason he said more hard work meant more produce was because production is low in organic farming since the soil, laden with chemicals, has to adapt to the manure. It takes time and effort but once the soil is purified, production picks up.

So one needs patience and less greed, and the reward is chemical-free, healthy food.

But wouldn't the farmers rather sell the crop at a higher price, and save money and eat cheaper potatoes? We could neither confirm nor dismiss that practice.

We saw many small farms, with cabbages and tomatoes growing under the sun. There were many polyhouses, too, nurturing veggies in warmth.

The sight would give one hope.

At least the new generation will not grow up with sub-standard food filled with harmful chemicals that people are forced to consume in cities and towns.

The feast

The villagers had prepared a feast for us for lunch and we ate to our heart's content - the sabzis, the daal and the rice, knowing that most of it had been grown right in that village. The taste was even better than our hotel fare, except for the maize beer, which I quietly kept away.

I wished to come back one day and stay in the village, eat that fabulous food and go on treks, and read books on economics and land laws borrowed from the library in the young sarpanch's wooden home.

Deadline 2015

We left the village in the afternoon and our next stop was the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (Agriculture Research Centre), where a scientist addressed us from a dais, answering our queries. We were curious about organic farming and probed deeper. Tilak Gajmer told us that organic farming had become the "people's mission" in Sikkim.

"Sikkim decided to go organic in 2013 due to environmental problems, due to the unsustainability of conventional farming," he told us.

"After we went organic, the government made it the 'Sikkim Organic Mission'. And the target to go fully organic was set for December 2015," Gajmer said.

Then he added the catch - the test all the state's farmers have to pass for this ambition. The test means certification of all the state's farmland as organic by an independent agency. That means a cultivated area of 50,000 hectares! And the area covered till November 2014 was just 15,000 hectares.

"There is another challenge," he said. "If even one farm is found to be non-organic, the state won't be given a fully organic tag. So it will be back to square one."

Pesticides banned

As such, the state government has gone for an extreme solution to prevent such an embarrassing situation. They have just passed a law that bans the use and sale of any pesticide in the state. Anyone found guilty can be fined up to Rs 1 lakh and jailed for three months! Imagine such a law in UP or Punjab.

He told us that besides vegetables, Sikkim's organic food products include paddy, wheat, spices, large cardamom, ginger, turmeric, flowers and mandarin oranges.

But the big question was: Isn't agricultural production falling due to the shift to organic?

Gajmer admitted that production was not enough to meet the state's demands (that's why the high prices).

"We have to buy from other states. Only 30 per cent of the population consumes organic and the rest use non-organic products," he said.

I saw this for myself when I went in search of Sikkim's famed red chillies in the Namchi market.

But Gajmer said that the state was setting up organic farmers' markets in different locations.

"The challenge is to maintain the integrity of organic products," he said.