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By N P Chekkutty
A decade ago, Kanjikuzhy in Kerala began to worry about the decline of farming. Then the community took the initiative to set up farmer groups and a distribution and retail network. Farmers and coir product manufacturers now get a fair price for their products and also bypass the middlemen
I met Saswathan, a 75-year-old farmer, in Kanjikuzhy, a small village on the Alapuzha coast. We were on a mission to study what goes on in rural Kerala as the state grapples with the difficult task of negotiating with the forces of globalisation and maintaining an egalitarian society that ensures a minimum livelihood to its people.
Kanjikuzhy is a panchayat on the Arabian Sea coast, tucked between Muhamma to the south and Mararikulam in the north. It is a predominantly farming economy supported by traditional trades such as the manufacture of coir products. Most of the 1,200-odd coir unit owners are also part-time agriculturalists. At the same time, Kanjikuzhy is at the centre of the economic transformations that have been brought in by globalisation. Its beaches are now booming health tourism spots and its coir products highly prized items exhibited in multinational retailing chains all over the world.
On the highway we spotted a brightly decorated outlet run by the Kanjikuzhy panchayat Primary Development Society (PDS), displaying a variety of fruits, vegetables and other farm produce, besides a range of coir products. The society collects these regularly from the farmers, who are paid in cash. No middlemen are involved.
Saswathan was at the outlet selling his vegetables. He looked happy with the Rs 200 he got for them.
Saswathan is just one of the scores of farmers in the village who sell their wares to the PDS outlet which accepts whatever the farmers have to offer, even things that are usually discarded when dealing with private businesses. Saswathan explained that the PDS outlet bought not only bananas but their leaves and fibre too, besides all kinds of vegetables, coconuts, melons, etc. The day’s price is displayed on a board at the outlet, and all payments are made in cash.
Santhosh, a pleasant looking man in his early-30s, is president of the PDS vegetable outlet. He told us how the PDS was started and how it functions.
Kanjikuzhy is a coastal region that used to focus primarily on its coir cottage industry. There were only a few farming families in the panchayat. Then, around a decade ago, community leaders began to get worried about the “lost career” of farming in the state and a decision was taken to attract youngsters to farming. Groups of farming communities were organised in each ward, and crops planted on leased land.
The movement was a success, says Santhosh. Saswathan agrees. Yields climbed and the question now was: how to sell all the vegetables and fruit being produced? Farmers in the past were often cheated by traders and small private vendors who would set up stalls along the highway, buy produce from the farmers on their own terms, and sell it at huge profits.
It was then that the idea of setting up marketing outlets was born. Dr T M Thomas Isaac, now finance minister of Kerala who represents Mararikulam (which includes Kanjikuzhy) in the state assembly, initiated and lent his support to an effort to organise what is now widely known as the Mararikulam Marketing Company Ltd, a registered society dealing with the production and marketing of local produce. They received support in building the infrastructure from the UNDP and the Rural Development Ministry at the Centre. Today, the company has its own production units employing local people, mostly women. They produce a variety of items such as jams, fruit juice, notebooks, soaps, umbrellas, pickles, fish and other marine products, coconut and coir products, etc. These products are marketed throughout the state under the ‘Mari’ brandname.
I went to visit Saswathan’s family who live in a small thatched house about a kilometre from the PDS outlet. Saswathan and his wife have three children. The eldest son is a toddy-tapper who works a dozen coconut trees and earns a daily income of around Rs 400. He explained that toddy, the natural brew from the coconut palm, is in great demand and he has to work on his trees twice a day: in the mornings he brings down the earthen pots that fill up during the night, and in the evenings he goes to work again tapping the tender leaves for their sap. “It is like milking a cow,” says Saswathan who also used to work as a toddy-tapper in his youth.
Saswathan says he is able to get a decent income from his two-acre plot on which he grows paddy, vegetables and bananas. He practises organic farming, although when there is a severe attack of pests he has no option but to use chemical pesticides. For manure, most farmers here depend on natural sources like compost, ash, cowdung, etc.
The village has around 80 full-time farmers now, each part of a group that focuses on a particular farming operation. Paddy cultivation is carried out as a group activity as it helps farmers sort out the acute labour shortage problem. Paddy cultivation is labour-intensive; sowing and harvesting have to be done on stipulated days, depending on the agricultural calendar. There are two types of paddy, based on the time taken to harvest. Virippu requires only four months till it is ready for reaping; mundakan, a more hardened variety, requires 10 months to mature.
The group works collectively. Each member -- generally a group has around 15-20 members -- is entitled to an equal share of the produce. All members have to take part in the activities; if someone opts out he has to pay a fine.
This approach has had a palpable impact on the lives of the people of Kanjikuzhy. Already there are as many as 242 self-help groups in the tiny village: 36 in coir (still the most important activity in the village), 16 in paddy cultivation, nine in floriculture, 11 in the coconut business, and the rest in a variety of other trade activities, small-scale industrial production, etc.
Since the PDS outlets were opened in February 2007, with a view to helping producers get maximum returns and eliminating middlemen, private vendors have practically gone out of business.
The greatest impact of the elimination of middlemen has been in the coir sector. In Kanjikuzhy, almost every house has a coir-making machine, known locally as thari, used to produce yarn, mats, carpets, packing material, etc. Women and children work on the machines in their spare time, with the men occasionally helping out.
Finished coir products are exported. In the past, the business was monopolised by a group of firms known as depots that would collect the finished products from small manufacturers and supply them to the exporters. This continued until four years ago Dr Isaac and others set up the coir PDS that took over the collection of coir products and introduced a more transparent business model. Dr Isaac says the coir PDS, which opened in 2003, has done business worth Rs 22 crore. This means the producers received an additional Rs 2 crore, as the middlemen earlier took 10% of the proceeds in a sale.
The struggle to break free of the stranglehold of depots has been a long and difficult one. Almost every small producer was indebted to a depot, as most had taken money as advance. The battle had to be waged on the global front, with direct communication between global outlets and consumer groups through an Internet campaign explaining how the producers were being fleeced by middlemen. That had a great impact as exporters, under pressure, began negotiating with small producers through the coir PDS, says Dr Isaac.
The Mararikulam experiment can be considered a success, a lot of the credit going to its dedicated volunteers. Jalaja, the block panchayat president, and Santhosh who heads the successful PDS outlet, are examples of the kind of people needed to lead the effort and replicate it in other areas. The Kanjikuzhy model is being tried out in the neighbouring panchayats of Muhamma, Aryad, etc, which are setting up similar groups, mainly in the coir sector.
I asked Santhosh whether it would be possible to convert the PDS outlets into a professionally run business. That, he said, would be disastrous. The Mararikulam model was strong because it did not have a bureaucratic setup, he said. If it did, this unique experiment would simply wither away.
(N P Chekkutty is a journalist based in Kerala.)
InfoChange News & Features, May 2008 |
