The documentary “Seed Stories,” which will be screened at the Mittal Institute on Monday, March 31, is a powerful and thought-provoking narrative on sustainability amid the rise of genetically modified cotton seeds and the spread of pesticides
In Seed Stories, filmmakers Chitrangada Choudhury, Director and Cinematographer, and Aniket Aga, Associate Director, bring viewers to a village deep in the Niyamgiri mountain range of Odisha’s Eastern Ghats (India), where an ecologist Dr. Debal Deb and his team are protecting over 1,500 heirloom rice varieties on an in-situ conservation farm. The region is one of the world’s surviving biodiversity hotspots and home to sophisticated traditions of agroecology of Indigenous (Adivasi) communities like the Kondhs. The film explores how the people’s ties to the land and their food systems is altering with the coming of genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds and the agrochemicals needed to grow them.
Following the film screening, Chitrangada and Aniket will speak in a talk moderated by Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico, Harvard University. They sat down with the Mittal Institute ahead of their event, to share more about their film and its motivations.
Barefoot ecologist Dr. Debal Deb and his small team are conserving over 1,500 heirloom rice varieties on a farm in the foothills of the Niyamgiri | By Chitrangada Choudhury.
Mittal Institute: Thank you both for speaking with us! Can you share a bit about your background, and what you each bring to the documentary? What inspired you to create this film?
Chitrangada Choudhury: I have been a journalist reporting on environmental justice struggles in Odisha (my home state) and the violence against Adivasi communities in the name of development in this wider region for over a decade. The film emerged organically out of my journalistic experiences and subsequently, out of our experiences of volunteering on Basudha Farm. This is an in-situ conservation farm in the foothills of the Niyamgiri, where the ecologist Dr. Debal Deb and his small team are conserving pro-bono over 1,500 rice varieties in-situ i.e. growing them and saving seeds every season for distributing to farmers – an effort I had reported on in a newspaper feature in 2014. At the same time, this region, which is home to sophisticated, yet under-recognized, knowledge traditions is rapidly changing with the coming of GM cotton seeds and herbicides. We felt that this was a vital story to chronicle and tell. One of my key motivations through the filmmaking process was to inform audiences about landscapes like the Niyamgiri, and to foreground the biodiversity-sustaining knowledge systems of Adivasi women farmers like Kunuji Kulusika. And to raise the question, what counts as knowledge, and what do we understand by sustainability?
Aniket Aga: I am an anthropologist and have studied the debate over GM food crops in India for over a decade and conducted ethnographic fieldwork with farmers in western India. When I travelled with Chitrangada to Odisha in 2018, I was really struck by how different farms here were from what I had seen in western India. In western India, as in much of the USA, farms have definite boundaries and grow very few crops in regimented rows with a steady diet of fertilizers and pesticides. In the Niyamgiri, many farmers cultivated a dizzying diversity of crops – many kinds of millets, pulses, beans, oil seeds – on unmarked hill slopes without synthetic chemical inputs. The seeds for these crops were held and sustained within communities. This model of farming is actually very productive but is condemned as backward. In a country with a deep agrarian crisis, and an epidemic of suicides by desperate farmers, we felt that this model of farming needed to be chronicled for wider audiences including farmers in other parts of India and beyond.
Mittal Institute: How are these agricultural changes affecting indigenous communities’ relationships with the land and their traditional knowledge systems?
Chitrangada Choudhury: This region is home to great agrobiodiversity, agroforestry and polycropping systems based on heirloom seeds, which are held in the community rather than obtained from the state or purchased from the market. The advent of genetically modified cotton seeds and the agrochemicals needed to grow them—including herbicides like glyphosate—are altering these long-running agroforestry systems. Slowly but surely, they are rewriting people’s relationship with their land, their knowledge systems and their own seeds, even as they get drawn into global supply chains of cotton.
“The advent of genetically modified cotton seeds and the agrochemicals needed to grow them … are altering these long-running agroforestry systems. Slowly but surely, they are rewriting people’s relationship with their land, their knowledge systems and their own seeds, even as they get drawn into global supply chains of cotton.”
The Niyamgiri Mountains in Odisha, Eastern India are one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots | By Chitrangada Choudhury.
Mittal Institute: What policy changes or government support would help sustain agricultural conservation?
Aniket Aga: In this era of climate crisis and all its attendant risks, biodiversity-rich, low-external inputs farming is the way to resilience. It also allows for a more diverse basket of produce and autonomy for farmers than conventional farming and even conventional ‘precision’ farming. It follows then that the government ought to recognize farmers like Kunuji Kulusika (in our film) as skilled and knowledgeable, rather than backward. We need policies to support them and compensate them for their contributions and we need agricultural scientific interventions to build on their knowledge base and take them to scale.
Kunuji Kulusika, a Kondh Adivasi (Indigenous) shifting cultivator and one of the main characters in the film Seed Stories grows a diverse basket of crops with heirloom seeds on the hill slopes of the Niyamgiri mountains | By Chitrangada Choudhury.
Mittal Institute: What gives you hope for the future of agricultural sustainability?
Chitrangada Choudhury and Aniket Aga: The movements by Indigenous communities and more broadly movements challenging race and caste across different parts of the world that are recognizing the contributions of such marginalized groups, as well as movements which are advocating for more just and equitable, ecologically-sound farming and food systems.
☆ The views represented herein are those of the interview subject and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Mittal Institute, its staff, or its Steering Committee.
