Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
championed organic farming as one of the solutions to Kerala's agrarian
crisis, and by 2011 the board and its leader had become celebrity figures in
the organic farming movement in India.5
Oddly for a celebrity, Vijayan is a soft-
spoken man whose main hobby
is bird watching. Framed pictures of birds ill his house, and his siting
room contains a clock that chimes on the hour with bird songs. A picture
of Salim Ali, one of India's prominent ornithologists, hangs on one wall.6
Vijayan is retired from the Biodiversity Board now, but he still acts as a
spokesperson for the state's organic farming policy.
As we sat sipping tea in Vijayan's siting room one aternoon, I asked
what had prompted him, as chair of the Biodiversity Board in 2007, to
make organic agriculture the board's priority.
“If you look at the biodiversity in general, you will find that the bio-
diversity loss is the worst in agrobiodiversity . . . the reason is the Green
Revolution and use of chemicals,” he began. “I have evidence for this, with
birds, because I started observing birds from 1969. And in those days,
from Palakkad to Thrissur, if you travel[ed] by any ways, you would see
on any road or lane, hundreds of baya nests.”7
“Hundreds of baya nests?” I asked, not knowing what a baya was.
“Baya. It's a weaverbird. They make their nests with straw, and they
make a long spiral thing. . . . It is a tubular nest, very beautiful . . . hun-
dreds of them you could see from the road,” he explained. Then his tone
turned somber. “Now you don't see a single one. The whole thing has
gone,” he said, waving his hands. “And nobody needs to tell me the reason.
It is very clear; it coincides with the use of pesticides, right? It's not only
the baya. . . . So my agenda is very clear.”
Spurred by Vijayan's concern for the disappearance of these beauti-
ful birds and the impoverishment of agricultural ecosystems in the state,
the Biodiversity Board's main agenda item became the conservation of
biodiversity by tackling chemical inputs.
The Kerala State Biodiversity Board does not have any regulatory au-
thority. It is only a statutory body that advises the state government. Yet
it succeeded in making its organic farming policy officially part of state's
regulatory structure in the Agriculture Department—and in geting it
