(Gesina Kunkel, Unsplash)
This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.
Author: Johnny Wood, Senior Writer, Formative Content
Debal Deb is known as the Seed Warrior, having spent the past two decades collecting and preserving India’s increasingly rare indigenous rice species.
The ecologist’s efforts have led to the creation of a massive seed bank, housing more than 1,410 endangered varieties.
Rare seed varieties are individually germinated in traditional clay pots and irrigated using cow urine, before being distributed to farmers to grow. Last year, more than 7,000 farmers in six Indian states benefited from free seeds, with the condition they begin to grow them and give some of their harvest to the local community to help the rural population feed itself.
India consumed 100 million tonnes of rice in 2018-2019, an amount second only to China. Rice is a staple in the world’s two most populous countries, as it is throughout Asia and many other parts of the planet.
But India’s native rice species are disappearing fast: decreasing from around 100,000 different strains to just 7,000 since the 1970s.
What caused such a dramatic decline?
It goes back to the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when many of India’s farmers switched to high-yield (HYV) seeds, supported by the use of pesticides and fertilizers.
Although the move boosted average grain yields, traditional rice strains – which had supported farming communities for generations – were mostly left behind. Rare strains survived only in hard-to-reach areas, or where farmers were too poor to afford the chemicals needed to propagate high-yielding crops.
“Every time a tiger or a rhino or any charismatic big animal was killed, millions of dollars poured in to support conservation efforts,” Deb explains in an interview with The Better India. But, he says, nobody “batted an eyelash” when traditional rice varieties were lost on such a large scale.
What is the World Economic Forum’s India Economic Summit 2019?
Under the theme, Innovating for India: Strengthening South Asia, Impacting the World, the World Economic Forum’s India Economic Summit 2019 will convene key leaders from government, the private sector, academia and civil society on 3-4 October to accelerate the adoption of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies and boost the region’s dynamism.
Hosted in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the aim of the Summit is to enhance global growth by promoting collaboration among South Asian countries and the ASEAN economic bloc.
The meeting will address strategic issues of regional significance under four thematic pillars:
• The New Geopolitical Reality – Geopolitical shifts and the complexity of our global system
• The New Social System – Inequality, inclusive growth, health and nutrition
• The New Ecological System – Environment, pollution and climate change
• The New Technological System – The Fourth Industrial Revolution, science, innovation and entrepreneurship
Discover a few ways the Forum is creating impact across India.
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Globally, 1 million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
New research in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution reveals a plant extinction rate described as ‘frightening’ by the paper’s authors, with 571 species disappearing from the planet since 1750. The study estimates this rate to be 500 times greater than that expected to occur naturally.
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