Food Sovereignty
Photo: Dolly Kikon
Projects
Practicing Food Sovereignty: Indigenous Peoples and Agroecological Relationships in the Eastern Himalayas
The Himalayan region is well-known as a biodiversity hotspot with several national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. It is also home to many Indigenous communities who continue to practice subsistence farming and depend on the land and forest for their sustenance. Practicing Food Sovereignty focuses on Indigenous communities and agricultural practices in Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Northeast India of the Eastern Himalayan and Indo-Burma regions.
Drawing on food sovereignty both as a conceptual and methodological framework, we explore emerging trends in food production and agricultural practices among Indigenous communities. Introduced by the transnational social movement La Via Campesina in 1996, the food sovereignty framework considers agriculture as a value system practice founded on culture and social justice. In a similar fashion, Indigenous communities in the above-mentioned regions are re-valuing and reviving aspects of their traditional modes of agriculture – knowledge, heritage plants, and cuisines – to cope with contemporary environmental risks and continue sustainability practices. The broad question we seek to explore in the project concerns Indigenous livelihood practices and food security in the context of present climate change.
This project is supported by Swedish Research Council.
Team
Beppe is a professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He is a working member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. He has studied anthropology, development, and economics at Uppsala University. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from Lund University in 1997.
Sanjay was a professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Guwahati campus). He was affiliated to the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and taught core papers at the Centre for Sociology and Social Anthropology. He completed his PhD in Sociology from North Eastern Hill University, Shillong. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Dolly was an associate professor of Development Studies and Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences in the University of Melbourne. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. She is currently the director for Centre for South Asian Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Meenal Tula
Meenal was a postdoctoral fellow with the project and based at North Eastern Social Research Centre (NESRC), Guwahati. She received her PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Hyderabad in 2016. Previously, she was involved in the study Gender, Land Rights and Labour in the Context of Socio-Economic Transformations in Northeast India at NESRC as Project Director. She draws on anthropological and historical approaches to explore the politics of gender and community in India.
Dixita Deka
Dixita was a postdoctoral fellow with the project and based at North Eastern Social Research Centre (NESRC), Guwahati. She completed her PhD in Social Sciences from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Guwahati) in 2021. She has received the Zubaan-Sasakawa Peace Foundation Grant for Young Researchers from Northeast India (2019) and the Annual VMMF-IAWS Young Research Scholars Award (2020). Currently, she is also writing a monograph under the South Asia Speaks 2022 mentorship program.
Joel assists as a research coordinator. As a peace researcher, his writings engage with law, violence, memory, food, and media. He has a masters degree in peace and conflict studies and a bachelor’s degree in mass media.
Seeds for the Future: Chapter One
The founder of the Annapurna Seed Library, Mahan Chandra Borah, shared that he was astonished to have once found seeds in a clay pot at home carefully packed and kept on a shelf just under the roof. It belonged to his great grandfather. When we met Mahan in March 2022, we saw how he had not only saved those seeds but had also increased its quantity by sowing it. Seeds afterall have life and need to be grown. Mahan has a collection of over 400 varieties of Indigenous paddy and his library located at Meleng Kathgaon in Assam’s Jorhat district is Northeast India’s first Indigenous seed saving library. In Assam’s neighbouring state Nagaland, the Chizami Women Society and North East Network set up community seed banks in 2018 thereby mobilising women from villages in Phek district. North East Slow Food & Agrobiodiversity Society (NESFAS) in Meghalaya has undertaken similar initiatives over the years. The idea was to check the proliferation of market seeds in the villages and to preserve the ‘better acclimatised’ and ‘hardy’ Indigenous seeds. While saving seeds is an old practice, these organised initiatives are relatively new in Northeast India and have opened up an intimate conversation on the culture and conservation of Indigenous variety of seeds based on traditional knowledge.
Seeds are our hope for the future and soul for our food system. Of late, the twin factors of climate change and market seeds have globally disrupted the ways seeds are preserved and food is grown. This necessitates examining the possible Indigenous innovations in building a resilient food system. We do not perceive Indigenous as pitted against science but reflect on the science in the Indigenous ways of saving seeds. Talking to Indigenous farmers and agro-scientists in Northeast India, we locate their allegiance to traditional knowledge based on the experiences of the ancestors and the elderly duly proved by experiments in laboratories.
We hope to begin conversations by strengthening our knowledge on Indigenous seeds and exchanging information on the many individual and communal efforts in the region towards preserving landraces and becoming food sovereign. One of the key objectives of the event was to profile the stories and experiences of community custodians of food and their work on food justice.
Our invited guests: Seno Tsuhah (Chizami Women Society), Manorom Gogoi (Tholgiri), Amba Jamir (Integrated Mountain Initiative), Bhogtoram Mawroh (North East Slow Food & Agrobiodiversity Society), Mahan Chandra Borah (Annapurna Seed Library), and Vilazonuo Gloria (North East Network – Nagaland).
The two-day workshop, Seeds for the Future: Chapter One, on 15th and 16th September 2022, began with a reflective evening with the resource persons. They motivated us to ask deeper and sharper questions while centring community knowledge and justice. The project team also felt it was essential to share with them our research findings, challenges, and questions that were emerging as we continued to dwell on the theme of food sovereignty. We believed our resource persons would carry our stories back to their communities, including farmers on the ground. We wanted to be open with the process of conducting research in the field, and not arrive at the end of simply showcasing the findings. On the second day, we had an interactive session at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati Campus. Moderated by anthropologist Dolly Kikon, the session opened with a panel discussion with the resource persons on the theme of Indigenous Foodways: The Future of Seeds, Food, and Community in the Eastern Himalayas. This was followed by a two-hour interactive session with students and faculty members. After the discussions, the students, research team, and resource persons proceeded to the Florica Nursery, Balipara, Sipajhar in Darrang district. Under the themes of seeds, plants, pests, and farm-to-plate, students formed smaller groups and participated in the learning process.
We present the learnings of Seeds for the Future: Chapter One workshop in our open-access book, Seeds and Food Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences published by North Eastern Social Research Centre (2023). In this book, we centre community engagements and pedagogy to understand farming practices across the Eastern Himalayan region. In doing so, we aim to facilitate new ways of learning together. We hope that this book will inspire further engagements and research with ongoing farming initiatives and food sovereignty movements in the region.
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Sustainable Futures: Agriculture, Ecology, and Conservation in India
On 27 May 2020, in the middle of COVID-19 induced lockdowns, a massive natural gas blowout occurred in Baghjan oil field in Assam’s Tinsukia district. The blowout caught fire soon after and caused immense damage. The fire covered the neighbouring villages, Dibru-Saikhowa Wildlife Park, and fragile wetlands of Maguri-Motapung. These ecologies are some of the richest Himalayan biodiversity zones in South Asia.
Sustainable Futures workshop aims to understand how reactions and reflections from such environmental disasters offer insights on emerging challenges on agriculture, sustainability, and communities (human and non-humans) on the ground. Following the blowout in Baghjan, the outrage from citizens in the Brahmaputra valley and beyond has resulted in social media and judicial advocacy campaigns against powerful agencies, such as Oil India Limited (OIL). The Baghjan disaster also witnessed how human, animals, and plants—as a cluster of beings—are threatened, thereby, breaking the ‘boundary’ that separates different species. In recent times, there have been increased encounters between humans and non-domesticated animals across the Brahmaputra valley, in rural as well as urban spaces. We invited researchers, activists, filmmakers, and journalists to draw from their intellectual and creative exercises in building a collective understanding of ecological and agricultural worlds in the eastern Himalayas.
Keeping these developments in mind, NESRC and the Department of Political Science, Dibrugarh University, organised a two-day workshop that was aimed at four outcomes:
- Expand on the ongoing interest in ecology, conservation, and arising inequities in the region (Northeast India) with an eye on experiences across the country;
- Discuss the changes in agricultural practices and agrarian structures that might be accelerating encounters between humans and non-domesticated animals in the region with experiences from other parts of the country;
- Initiate an interactive map of infrastructure development that induce water–related disasters—floods, water logging, mudslides, landslides—for both humans and animals in the region with an eye on experiences in other parts of the country;
- Understand advocacy and evolving environmental law in India, especially in the last three decades with a focus on their impact in Northeast India.
Photo: Dolly Kikon
Our invited guests: Kesang Tshomo (National Organic Flagship Program, Government of Bhutan), Dolly Phukon (Professor, Department of Political Science, Dibrugarh University), Nitin Sethi (Media Lead, National Foundation for India), Aniket Aga (Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Ashoka University), Walter Fernandes (Director, North Eastern Social Research Centre), Kaustubh Deka (Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Dibrugarh University), Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman (Programme Coordinator, Heinrich Böll Foundation), Bibhuti Lahkar (Head, Asian Elephant Research and Conservation, Aaranyak), Premila Bordoloi (Assistant Professor, Assam Agricultural University), Samir Bordoloi (Secretary General, Spread NE), and Chandan Kumar Sharma (Professor, Department of Sociology, Tezpur University).
Our invited participants: Dixita Deka, Amrita Pritam Gogoi, Deboleena Sengupta, Namita Brahma, Abhishruti Sarma, Dimum Pertin, Sayan Deori, Trishita Shandilya, Meenal Tula, and Shradha T. K. Lama.
Northeast India release of Genetically Modified Democracy (2021), Orient Blackswan.
Food, Community, and Culture: Agroecological practices in Northeast India
The Food, Community, and Culture conference invited people to reflect together on sustainable food, Indigenous knowledge, and diverse food cultures. There is a wide range of food grown, foraged, preserved, and cooked in the Eastern Himalayas. While celebrating the flavours and ingredients from diverse food cultures, this conference sought to acknowledge, reflect, and respond to a range of existing environmental, political, social, and economic challenges.
In Northeast India, decades of militarisation and violence have interfered with agrarian practices and foodways disrupting Indigenous relationships with land. These developments have led to increased vulnerability for indigenous communities across the region. Human rights violations and counterinsurgency operations which imposed restrictions on movement of farming and foraging communities have directly impacted Indigenous food sovereignty and obliterated people’s capacities to exercise collective self-determination. The sustained attack by the state on the indigenous practice of shifting (jhum) cultivation can be seen as a part of this. Due to these contexts, food is deeply political and cannot be disassociated from processes of colonialism, sovereignty, and violence.
The two-day Food, Community, and Culture conference was co-organised by North Eastern Social Research Centre; Department of Sociology and Nutrition and Community Action Resource Centre (NCARe), Tezpur University; the University of Melbourne; and Stockholm University. It aimed for four outcomes:
- Highlight the growing interest in indigenous food and local knowledge across Northeast India;
- Examine the challenges and opportunities in existing agricultural practices, livestock rearing, and agrarian structures around food production;
- Create an indigenous nutrition map for respective communities based on their existing ecology and infrastructure such as proximity to water, forest, mountains, plains, and urban hubs; and
- Discuss the emerging food advocacy and social movements in Northeast India with a focus on their social, political, and economic impact.
Our invited guests: Abeno Ovung (Planning and Livelihood Expert, Nagaland Forest Management Project, Government of Nagaland), Catherine Lalnuntluangi (PhD Scholar, Department of Sociology, Tezpur University), Chandan Kumar Sharma (Professor, Department of Sociology, Tezpur University), Chenxiang Rimchi Marak (Senior Associate,North East Slow Food and Agrobiodiversity Society), Dejna Daulagupu (Research Assistant, North Eastern Social Research Centre), Dolly Kikon (Associate Professor, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne), Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia (Visiting scholar, Asian Studies Program, University of California, Riverside), Kreni Lokho (Assistant Professor, Department of Botany, Asufii Christian Institute), Lansothung Lotha (Range Forest Officer, Wokha Forest Division, Government of Nagaland), Lobeno Mozhui (Assistant Professor, Department of Zoology, Nagaland University), Longshibeni Kithan (Assistant Professor, Department of Folkloristics and Tribal Studies, Central University of Karnataka), Namami Sharma (Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work, Tezpur University), Nirmali Gogoi (Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Science, Tezpur University), Phatik Tamuli (Principal, Lanka Mahavidyalaya), Ritusmita Goswami (Assistant Professor, Centre for Ecology, Environment, and Sustainable Development, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati), Sanjay Barbora (Professor, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati), Sayan Deori (Project Manager, Nutrition and Community Action Resource Centre), and Vincent Darlong (Director, Centre for Sustainable Development Studies, Martin Luther Christian University).
Our invited participants: Dixita Deka, Joel Rodrigues, Laribha Dohtdong, Meenal Tula, Ninzay Lhamu, and Nunglen Lepcha.
Publications
Books
- Kikon, D. & Rodrigues, J. (Eds.). (2023). Food Journeys: Stories from the Heart.(New Delhi: Zubaan).
- Deka, D., Rodrigues, J., Kikon, D., Karlsson, B. G., Barbora, S., & Tula, M. (2022). Seeds and Food Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences (Guwahati: North Eastern Social Research Centre).
Peer Reviewed articles
- Tula, M. & Karlsson, B. G. ‘Miracle Millets: Indigenous Food Sovereignty and the Revival of Ancient Grains in Northeast India’. South Asia (Forthcoming)
- Tula, M., & Karlsson, B. G. (2024). ‘Resurgent diversity: upland agriculture, indigenous crops and foodways in Eastern Himalayas’. Contemporary South Asia, 32(4), 504–522. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2024.2416433
- Deka, D., & Kikon, D. (2024). Guerrilla farms: Practicing food sovereignty in Assam. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758241288100
Journal special issue
Social Action, volume 73, issue 4 (October-December 2023) on Food Sovereignty and Environmental Justice(Guest Editors: Sanjay Barbora and Meenal Tula). Includes,
- Karlsson, B. G. ‘Cultivating the Future: Buckwheat as a sustainable food crop for the Anthropocene’. pp. 350-363.
- Tula, M. ‘Economies of Care: Imagining Food Sovereign Communities in Eastern Himalayas’. pp. 364-377.
Popular articles
- Deka, D. & Kikon, D. (July 20, 2023). ‘Guerrilla Gardens: Memories and Hope in a Lemon Orchard‘. The India Forum.
- Deka, D. & Kikon, D. (April 19, 2023). ‘Strawberry Farms: An Excerpt From Seeds and Food Sovereignty‘. The Locavore.
- Deka, D. & Kikon, D. (June 1, 2022). ‘Strawberry farms: Adopting New Crops in Northeast India‘. Raiot.in.
Documentary movie
- Abundance: Living with a Forest (2024) by Dolly Kikon.