Simon Hirschhofer

What is the better choice, buy local conventional food or buy organic from overseas? Thottathil picks up the reader with this question that, I think, many consumers already asked themselves. Another, similar question could be if organic food from abroad still is a good choice, considering the ecological footprint. She then describes how the Indian state Kerala introduced an organic farming policy, after having suffered a substantial crisis in its agronomic sector. Yearlong application of pesticides has exhausted the soil, poisoned the waters and have left their marks in the countless disabled children. India’s farmers have killed themselves in thousands, most of them by drinking the pesticides they were not able to get rid of and that were the cause of ever declining yields. After Thottathil, this was the point when the Keralan government decided to ban all pesticides within a ten year’s transition plan. What follows then is a description of the backgrounds, cultural, environmental, social and how these influenced, guided, enabled or complicated the transition. In the last two chapters, she again opens her view on the world by discussing how the Keralan movement can be seen as an example, as a model and that, in her opinion, organic farming remains superior to any “chemical” farming, no matter where it comes from. In the end, the consumer has the power to start a trend which may be followed by a policy. What I like about Thottathil’s treatise is that she brings a lot of personality into the text, despite it still could be considered as a scientific work. In many cases, she also was successful in catching a situation and describing it so well, one can almost smell the production of panchagavayya, a special fertilizer and pesticides they re-discovered. I also liked her discussion of the top three counter-arguments of organic farming: first, a lower nutritional value of organic foodstuff, second, that it cannot feed the world because yields are lower and third, that organic farming just imitates industrial farming, just by cancelling the chemical pesticides. On the other side, some excerpts seem a bit dry, with lots of detail that the normal reader quickly gets lost in, where in other places, she tells too little: I would rather have read more on how exactly organic farming happens, if there is a lot of agroforestry, if mixed cultures are the standard or if it looks more like the kind of organic farming we have here in Switzerland – not with large-scale monocultures, but still with divided species so that mechanic harvesting is possible. This would be important information when transferring Thottathil’s observations to other parts of the world.