Archives for March 2010

From March 26…

After a 5:45am wake up call to head to the airport, I am exhausted right now. I’m on the airplane from Hyderabad to Mumbai, but I can’t sleep. I keep thinking about the key lessons I have learned as a study tour as both an organizer and a student for the Agriculture in India trip.

Context: As an Indian-American, I have visited India often but had only lived here for 6 months in Mumbai before MIT. Through the lens of my classmates, I was the “expert.” I learned about the balance of what I could provide and what I could not provide my peers. How could I change the “expert” lens into creating a culture of many experts and knowledge sharing?

Perspective: Having lived in India, I also had the greatest understanding of the Indian perspective-from rickshaw drivers “knowing but not really knowing” how to get somewhere, to the language barrier of Telegu and Punjabi, to the need to “ask for a bill” or the culture to “not question” senior figures in certain situations.

This got me thinking: who really is the expert? Is it the 60 year old agricultural Indian scientist, the 40 year old farmer, the 50 year old prime minister, or the self help womens groups? This is why stating and reviewing assumptions is so important, because it all comes down to context and perspective.

“I don’t sell a commodity in Zameen, I sell a concept. How can I, I as 6,000 farmers, bring value to a product?” -Satish Chukkapalli, Zameen Director

The organic cotton movement in India is not just about organic cotton, it’s about water and energy savings, women’s empowerment, soil nutrition, and farmer health. Zameen Organics is a farmer-owned company trading cotton through a simple ethical supply chain rather than in a tangled knot of middlemen.

• Pesticide Free Health Impact: India is home to 1/3 of the world’s cotton farmers, their crops accounting for 54% of the country’s annual pesticide consumption despite growing on only 5% of its arable land. The effects of pesticide exposure include weakness, cramps, unconsciousness, convulsions, and potentially death. Zameen Organics supports pesticide free cotton farmers, supporting  their health and their families.
• Economic Development: Schemes by the Government of India and international chemical fertilizer companies have caused farmers to become trapped in the debt cycle. Every year 120,000 farmers commit suicide deaths in India. Zameen seeks to build a fair trade organic movement to rid farmers of this debt trap.
• Female Empowerment: In addition to the manual labor by women, women must provide domestic duties. They do not have the ability to own property, leading to a harder life in accessing credit, labor, and subsidized inputs. Zameen support women cotton farmers, improving their access to fair wages and domestic needs.

As a business school student, I was inspired by this example for a new innovative business plan in Indian agriculture. Whether geared towards reducing crop waste, building a value chain, or selling a fair trade organic brand, this study tour has helped me see the opportunities to start agriculture-related companies that are economically, environmentally, and socially viable.

On Saturday, while most of the team was in Agra, Lilian Tse and I decided to venture to Khan Market in Delhi to FabIndia.

FabIndia started as an export house and has become a successful retail business presenting Indian textiles in a variety of natural fibers and home products including furniture, lights, lamps, stationery, home accessories, pottery and cutlery in the Indian domestic market

The FabIndia Organics section, which started in 2004, caught my eye. It was there where I saw the potential for organic processed foods: organic rice, honey mustard, turmeric powders, spices and teas across shelves.

I picked up Bill Bissell’s (CEO of FabIndia ) book, “Making India work.” His vision is to reimagine India-a future with rapid growth, thriving environment, and virtually no poverty. He notes that while regular consumption does not lead to a higher quality of life, conscious consumerism of environmentally sustainable products can have multifarious positive externalities across the value chain.

“Punjab is both a model and a disaster.”-Surinder Singh, India Planning Commission Agriculture Advisor

Punjab, the land of 5 rivers, is home to bhangra, chicken tikka masala, and also to my family and ancestors. My father was born in Mari Udhoke, a village of 2,000 people in Punjab and spent most of his youth in Chandigarh, Punjab. His grandparents worked in farming before the Green Revolution, a time before hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides drastically increase the livelihoods of farmers in India.

Fast forward to last Wednesday, we met with Ajmer Dhatt, a professor at Punjab Agricultural University and from a farming family himself. Before the Green Revolution, families like my father’s could not dream of owning TVs and cars, yet Ajmer and his relatives have a beautiful family home, car, cell phones in Bhattian, a village of 2,000 people.

While the Green Revolution provided great benefits, chemical seeds and fertilizers have caused the overuse of pesticides. Today Indian soil requires four times the amount of fertilizer than 40 years ago and crop yields are dropping. The biggest issue in Punjab now is water. We saw deep ground wells and constantly pondered- How can business school students help?

Whether through clean water technologies or by improving supply chains to increase access to the market for value added products, the possibilities are immense.

This week the farmer research team ventures to Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, a state known for its progressive and sustainable methods of farming. We are meeting with the Center for Sustainable Agriculture, BASIX, Acumen Fund, and the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty in order to identify current solutions to this issue.

10 MIT MBA’s are on a farm in rural India? Well, we’re about to find out. Last September, I met my dear friend and peer Shayna Harris, who previously worked at Oxfam. We began stirring up ideas on how to build an interest in agriculture issues at business school. We met three more amazing women-Daria Kaboli, Adah Chan, and Weisen Li and formed a study tour called “Agriculture & Innovation in Brazil and India.” We have spent 5 seminars discussing agriculture issues across the supply chain speaking with academics, farmers, consultants, company owners. On Saturday, we head into our final planning session and head off to either Brazil or India on Sunday.

One of my favorite lessons from the Study Tour is the importance of acknowledging assumptions. Hal Hamiltion from the Sustainable Food Lab shared an important thought with us:

“Often the greatest barriers to conversation are the assumptions, judgements and barriers of the participants themselves.

Western participants usually arrive at Third World sites (especially rural sites) with the assumption in their mind that people who have less material wealth than them are “poor.” Individuals on site can often also re-enforce this label through their own actions – partially because this is the only relationship they have known with Westerners. This leads to a re-enforcing of power-structures which only entrench the barriers to honest conversation.

The alternative is to arrive differently. Rather than assume that people with less material wealth are “poor” it makes much more sense to arrive with at least the possibility in mind that they are equally, or more, wealthy in other domains. This creates the space for a conversation between equals.

A number of times I’ve had participants ask me what we’re giving back to a site, it being clear that we have somehow “taken something away”. Such an attitude, again, tells us more about the mindsets of participants than it does about the real needs of people at a site. It assumes that people “need” something that we have and they don’t. While this may be true at some level, it’s an assumption and a judgement which should be questioned.”