Kundrati Karma - Act Naturally, Documentary

Act Naturally is a non-profit who promotes non-violent biodiverse agricultural practices to solve problems in health and food security.

Our mission is to provide a transitional fund that provides debt relief and organic farming education and support. With our Khet Jyoti Fund, farmers are put on a four year transition period to slowly shift from chemical to organic farming. Their risks are minimized through Act Naturally's partnerships that provide seeds, education and income support.

We are driven to severe farmers ties with corporate agribusiness predators like Monsanto thus eliminating costly inputs and the need for future debts.

As part of our mission to increase public awareness worldwide about the benefits of organic agriculture and biodiverse farming practices, nutritional appropriation by agribusiness, and issues in national food security, we are raising money to create a 60 minute documentary.

There are an estimated 1.2  billion people in India. In Mumbai, there are 27,000 people per square kilometer. Population is projected to rise to 1.6 billion by 2050 and each one has to eat. With dwindling farmland, polluted resources, erratic climate and a corporate stronghold on agriculture, how will there be enough food to feed her masses?

There are those in government, industry and philanthropy who espouse that India can't feed her people unless she uses genetically modified seeds paired with special pesticides and fertilizers in mono cropped fields, reliant on gas powered equipment and open irrigation. As we have witnessed since the Green Revolution, that approach has created environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, displacement of farmers, high debt, and billowing profits for agribusiness empires. So why would the people, not to mention the farmers adopt such techniques knowing the consequences?

Every culture maintains and changes itself through the stories present in the mind of its people.  It is also said that where you put your attention is what you become conscious of. Understandably it is in the interest of the Agribusiness industry to capitalize on or drive  cultural shifts toward its objectives, and it has through massive media campaigns, subsidies, university partnerships and farming extension services. The constant tout of a new modern India, has thoroughly steamrolled a once coherent thread of natural wisdom that fed her people for thousands of generations, and western industrial agribusiness has been at the controls.  To the lay masses, struggling to work and eat, the reasons why their health and the health of the community is in decline becomes part of the backdrop of modernization and the story remains unquestioned.

The documentary begins by using a montage of video showing the juxtaposition of modern India - western fast food shops, growing waist lines, shots of BMWs whizzing past emaciated children, gated high rise communities, club life and fashions shows amid a struggling labor class, emaciated people and cattle, thick pollution, street vendors and slums.

Then we take the cameras to the street level. We will ask  biotechnology and agricultural students, farmers, street vendors, rickshaw drivers, etc. "Can India feed her people?" And ask them to qualify how they know. We'll interview people from the growing urban middle class, and ask them the same question. We'll use their accounts to show how new consumer attitudes are favoring technology and expansion over tradition and agricultural conservatism.


Ten minutes into the documentary we will show how India came to rely on western industrial agriculture to feed its people through interviews with environmental and social activists, and agricultural policy makers, and reporters. We'll report on the role of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations who laid the groundwork for an agricultural shift that would use chemical inputs, special seeds, and western agricultural techniques to improve food production - a story known as the Green Revolution. 


We'll present how philanthropic foundations created reasons for India to adopt American industrial agriculture techniques in order to gain
unrestricted access to the Indian market.  We'll explore how
capitalizing on starvation and drought opened the doors to foreign
interventions such as the introduction of GMO seeds.

The next part of the documentary will ask "Can India feed her people?" to farmers and agricultural workers and organizations.  Then we will ask them how. We will ask the founders of the Deccan Development Society, Navdanya, Khet Virasat Mission, and Timbuktu Organics, successful agricultural organizations with an emphasis on organics, the same questions. We will interview prominent farm movement leaders, including the Indian chapter of La Via Campisino, and the KRSS movement in the south.

We will then contrast these answers with the plight of small land holding farmers who have lost their land do to escalating input costs in the Vidarbha region. We will also interview a family who lost their father to suicide to escape debt and humiliation.
 
At the very end of the documentary we will call for the creation of a new story, one that empowers farmers to farm and transfers authorship to India's people for their food sovereignty.

Please feel free to write us with any questions at [email redacted].  If you would like to know more about India's agricultural situation visit our blog at www.actnaturallyblog.wordpress.com. You can also go to our brand new website at www.actnaturally.org to find out more about our programs. Will you Act Naturally with us?

Please note the pictures and video shown in the video promotional and interview were generously supplied by Helkin Rene Diaz. You can visit his website at: Helkin Rene Photo.