A Snack’s Journey from the Farm to Your Mouth | Aruna Rangachar Pohl | TED

You all had some tea?

OK.

Biscuits, perhaps?

OK.

So we all love biscuits, right?

Audience: Yes.

So join me now on a story and a journey

of India’s -- one of the most popular brands of biscuits.

Let's meet Devraj Pai,

a small farmer who grows wheat on his one-hectare farm

in arid Gujarat.

This wheat is harvested and trucked 42 kilometers

to a government marketplace,

and there it is bought by a trader,

who then sells it on 100 kilometers further

to a commercial flour mill.

At the mill, it is stripped of all of its nutrients and fiber

and then converted to refined flour.

And then it is trucked another 400 kilometers further

to a larger factory to be mixed with refined sugar,

which has had a similar long journey.

All of this is mixed with chemical preservatives, artificial flavors,

and then baked into biscuits using energy-guzzling machines

and then trucked 500 kilometers

back to the same villages.

Now consider this.

Devraj Pai sold his wheat for 22 rupees a kilo,

and then he buys this stripped-down,

sugary unhealthy biscuits for his family

at 120 rupees a kilo,

almost five times more.

This is just the tip of the math iceberg.

Underneath lies the hidden world of margins at multiple points,

fuel costs,

infrastructure costs

and another painful, unaccounted, hidden cost.

The cost to nature.

All this in the guise of modern efficiency and scale?

What the f-- truck are we not seeing here?

(Laughter and applause)

This is a tiny example

of the highly polluting industrial farming model

that is eating the world.

Let's zoom out and view this.

No escaping it.

India is the world's most populous country,

yet it is still pretty low,

among the lowest in terms of per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, for an India under construction, rapidly modernizing,

this is the fifth largest economy,

shortly to be the fourth.

For Indians on consumption steroids,

it is third in terms of purchasing power parity.

A story of growth that is inexorably interlinked with global warming.

How green is our current or future?

As brown as my face, friends.

Contributing 20 percent to this browning of the planet is agriculture,

with over half the country's workforce engaged in it.

Staring us in the face

is this absolute imperative to power green production

and empower green consumption.

A daunting task for India's 150 million small farmers

who own less than two hectares of land.

Now I grew up in awe of nature

as I tagged along with my civil engineer father

in the deepest jungles of India.

My mother, she taught me respect for Indigenous foods, cultures

and the kinship of communities.

A 25-year digression into the modern food industry.

Traveling the world was a roller coaster ride of the good, the bad,

and the ugly of what the farmer grows

to what lands up on a consumer's plate.

So my midlife crisis coincided with the climate crisis,

and that motivated me to set up

India Foundation for Humanistic Development

with a vision to rejuvenate productive landscapes

equitably and sustainably.

We work with small farmers across India,

as well as Indigenous communities in 22 states

to promote natural farming,

green enterprise development and habitat conservation.

I see my work as knitting,

knitting a patchwork quilt of stories, of communities,

their challenges,

and the change makers

and, you know, presenting this vibrant, multi-hued,

expanding and evolving saga to the powers that be.

And ...

I would like to now take you

to a golden patch, as I zoom in,

on a golden patch in Belgaum district of Karnataka in the south,

where the heroes of my story are 10,000 small farmers.

This story brings to life how green production can lead to green consumption

in a more equitable and sustainable way.

Let's meet Anand.

He's a small farmer growing maize

in Belgaum on a two-hectare farm.

Anand is also, you know, the proud managing director

of the Saudati Farmer Producer Company Limited.

Saudati Company has 1,000 farmers like our Anand,

who are shareholders and co-owners.

Their collective strength allows them to operate at scale,

to raise finance,

to bulk purchase farm inputs, to eliminate middlemen

and then to trade directly with big buyers for higher prices.

By improving their farming efficiency,

the Saudati farmers are earning at least 25 percent more

and break away from high-interest micro loans that they needed before.

They also get better-than-market prices for their produce

from Anand and his team during season.

Now, the profits from Saudati company

are invested back into the company

or distributed to the farmer shareholders at the end of the year,

and this is a decision that is jointly taken.

How green is my valley?

To know this,

let's visit the 1,000 co-owners of Saudati company,

who are transitioning

from a chemical-based monocrop agriculture

to an organic, multi-crop farming system at scale

through our natural farming trainings.

We track and trace their production practices

through an app called FoodSign,

which allows us to capture the tons of carbon

that is sequestered on their lands.

This is then traded to earn carbon revenues

to create assets that would benefit the whole community.

This could be a production facility,

this could be a common warehouse or a primary health center,

or even a drinking-water facility.

Their decision.

Now it does pay to green production, right?

Let's now meet the heroines of my story

who power the green production to green consumption pipeline.

Meet Kamala and her 12-member self-help group,

who are shareholders of Saudati.

And they run a micro enterprise

and yeah, they produce biscuits.

Whole wheat and millet flour is mixed with jaggery.

A jaggery is an iron-rich brown sugar.

This is baked in ovens that run on solar or biomass energy.

Simply packed and sold locally.

Our Doorstep incubator program

supports nine such farmer-producer companies,

with 9,000 shareholders in Belgaum district

who are linked to 150 micro enterprises,

which are run by women and youth

who just add value to local produce

for local markets using renewable energy.

Let's step back

and think a bit.

Do you see the simple, fantastic math happening here?

A lone, two-hectare subsistence farmer

transforms into this joint-venture

of a 10,000 farmers

managing 20,000 hectares of produce

and earning multi-million rupees.

A local circular food economy.

That has the impact to ...

benefit a whole district with a million population.

Mind boggling, but doable.

This scenario is something that can be repeated or replicated

100,000 times across India.

And ...

Secure the right to ...

affordable, sufficient

and culturally appropriate food for a billion Indians.

This is a reset button that connects culture to policy,

and to reverse and repair a broken food system

to a green and fair food system.

There are three things that underpin all that we do

to let a thousand Belgaums bloom.

One is a farming system that is climate-resilient,

uses existing natural resources to improve productivity

and farm incomes,

just as our 10,000 farmers are showing us.

Two, a production system that adds value close to source

and

conserves natural resources

as well as allocates fair value to producer

as well as consumer.

We do know,

I think by now, that Camilla's biscuits are surely tastier and healthier

for our kids, right?

Three.

A value system that protects nature

and people's rights.

The ten farmer-producer companies with their communities in Belgaum

are a living example of equitable ownership and joint decision making.

In Sanskrit, India's oldest language,

we say (speaking Sanskrit).

This means “the world is one family.”

Showing up where and when it matters,

sharing and caring is my family trait.

For me, this means the world of food is in our collective hands.

And we must,

we should learn to value food

from the lens of climate and communities.

You can do this.

By connecting to the journey of food.

And choosing what lands up in your shopping cart.

Will you?

Pretty please?

Pretty please.

Thank you.

(Applause)