Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Church leaders that unrolled modernizing reforms in the institution, to
encourage greater lay participation. Peringarapillil elaborated on how the
Second Vatican Council moved him: “I consider myself a real product of
Vatican II, change in the Church.
. . . That has influenced my social out-
look, my theological outlook, and all that formation.”
Yet it was not just the reforms within the Church that inspired Perin
-
garapillil to work for change. The writings of Japanese farmer Masanobu
Fukuoka, which had also influenced Usha's thinking at Thanal, clinched
his decision to focus on farming in ways different from those that had
been promoted under the Green Revolution. “He was a scientist
—
university scientist—and a professor, who gave up everything and came
back to be a farmer, yes,” Peringarapillil said of Fukuoka. “So that inspired
many groups in the South. He was an inspiration, especially
. . . through
one of his topics,
One Straw Revolution
.
. . . And I . . . got the confidence I
can work, I can go, anybody can go the organic way.”
Certified organic agriculture, according to Peringarapillil, held the key
to “going the organic way” in South India. For him, organic certification
represented “ample opportunity for growing and marketing, and farmers'
condition [would] become beter.” W hen I asked him how he had learned
about the certification process, he credited his time in Europe for his dis-
covery that there were growing consumer markets for organic foodstuffs.
Around the same time, in the late 1990s, the Indian government had also
started to consider national organic farming standards. Several farmers
had even begun experimenting with certification in Wayanad; however,
funding for their efforts was limited.37
P. J. Chackochan, a Syrian Christian farmer from Wayanad involved in
INFA M and a friend of Peringarapillil's, was one such farmer encouraged
early on by INFA M to pursue certification. He had been growing medic-
inal plants, vegetables, and cash crops organically since 1991, after being
haunted by the memory of an event that had occurred several years ear-
lier: His young cousin accidentally mixed a bag of the pesticide ecalex into
a pond of pet fish, leading to the sudden death of the fish. Chackochan
had vowed to promote organic agriculture ever since. On one occasion, he
explained to me his initial inquiry into third-party certification, through
an inspection and certification agency based in Europe. He recollected
