Losing Agriculture and Gaining Nothing
There is a village in Azad Kashmir that has so far not recorded a single case of cancer. This is attributed to organic food locally produced. Few decades ago the similar story was of this part of Kashmir. Where have we gone wrong? Today we lament Green Revolution, we think agriculture is no longer worth investment, we find massive unemployment of farmers. All this implies catastrophe for a population that heavily relied on agriculture for livelihood. Let us understand how we destroyed our traditional basis for livelihoods and replaced it with something that is elusive and deceiving. And we end up with hardly anything worth having at such a huge cost. I illustrate the case by turning to Ladakh that has been very recently modernized and can be seen as almost a contemporary case for anyone to see. I simply reproduce few passages from a book Ancient Futures written on modernization of Ladakh by internationally acclaimed scholar Helena Norberg-Hodge that traces ...