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Earlier news from Bhutan, probably unknown to most American readers:
From 2008 to 2013, Dr. Appachanda Thimmaiah served as the organic agriculture consultant to Bhutan and set in motion a plan to turn the whole country organic by 2020. Bhutan's head of state is King Dorjme Wangchuck.
On the eastern side of the Himalayas, Bhutan is a tiny country with a population of around 750,000 people, a little larger than the population of Detroit spread over a mountainous nation about one and a half times the size of Maryland, known for being one of the happiest nations in the world because the government emphasizes its unique Gross National Happiness metric, which measures progress through the spiritual, physical, social, and environmental health of its citizens.
It is the first country in the world to become 100-percent organic.
Bhutan is the first country in the world to become 100-percent organic.
For the small nation, going organic was not such a big leap, because the majority of food already originated from small farmers. It wasn't until the 1980s when synthetic agro-chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides were introduced that things began to change. In 2011, the country decided to phase out those chemicals, to make the entire country's agricultural system organic by 2020.
The man behind that transition was Dr. Appachanda Thimmaiah, currently the associate professor of sustainable living at Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, and from 2008 to 2013 he served as the Bhutanese organic agriculture consultant. He wrote the book on Bhutanese organic certification, so the website. Munchies interviewed him recently about his plan for Bhutan and if such a strategy could be applied to the States. That interview here is excerpted, and I encourage the reader to read the whole interview.
Munchies: Cows have been widely criticized as being a high-methane emitter. They also take up a lot of space, no?
Dr. Appachanda Thimmaiah: We are talking about the small cows, not the high-yielding milking cows which are fed with grains and genetically modified crops and stuff like that. We are talking about small, miniature cows which are designed by nature to consume the locally available fodder and convert that to a very nutrient-rich manure. You don't need a large dairy for organic farming. You just need one cow which is sufficient for 25 to 30 acres.Munchies: How did you go about teaching everyone about organic farming?
Dr. A. T.: I wrote a book called A Guide to Organic Agriculture in Bhutan. This became a bible for organic agriculture and it's an open source training manual without intellectual property rights. It's been printed multiple times; the guidebooks are being distributed free and translated into the local language. The next stage was training the trainers. Every year, I had a program of training the trainers so that even in my absence the whole knowledge remains in Bhutan. Now they are very self-sufficient and they know the art and the science of organic farming.
Munchies: Let's talk about the certification process.
Dr. A. T.: For organic farmers around the globe, that is one of the biggest headaches of the industry. They didn't have organic standards when I started out. Most of the organic standards were copied from the European standards, but that's specific to the European region. So I tailored something that is very specific to Bhutan. I found that in the certification system, if you have an external inspector from India or from Thailand coming in and certifying, then the cost of the whole process would be very high. It includes flying the person in, paying the certification charges, and the annual renewal of the certification.My personal view is: Why is the whole world asking organic farmers to certify? It should be the polluters and the farmers who are applying chemical fertilizers and pesticides who should be getting certified. They are the ones who are actually polluting the environment and the whole farming system. This was my argument. I spoke to the agriculture minister about this and I developed a system called "Bhutan Organic Certification System (BOCS)." It became the responsibility of the government to inspect and certify the organic farmers free of cost. They should not be penalized for doing good, they should not pay for providing environmental services. They should be rewarded for doing good.
So this system is being implemented now and this is the first system in the world. I call it a zero-cost certification system, where the farmer does not pay anything. It's not just about producing food devoid of synthetic agrochemicals. It's about the environmental services that they produce like clean water, clean land, clean food, saving the bees and birds, and contributing to biodiversity.
Munchies: What's the farming industry like in Bhutan now?
Dr. A. T.: Seventy to 80 percent of the farms are very small and are on one hectare or less than a hectare of land. To an extent, 80 percent of the farms are now organic. It's the ones that reside by the roads that aren't. These farmers have easier access to chemical fertilizers. For those farmers who are living at the top of the mountain, it's too expensive to transport a couple of bags of fertilizers to the top of the village. The transportation cost itself would be more than the cost of the fertilizer. Some of the rice farmers use mainly weedicides and herbicides because there is a shortage of labor. Not many people are showing interest in farming. A rice plantation requires a large amount of labor, especially for weeds. That's why they use weedicides.Is an all-organic policy possible in a country as large as the United States? Yes, it is possible, but we need a strong spiritual connection for this. It cannot be a policy that is shoveled deep down the throat. It works well in Bhutan because of their Buddhist policies.
Organic farming is an enlightened way of doing things. It's a smarter way of doing things. It's a righteous way of doing things. It's collectivism. It's doing farming together. We have deep spiritual connection to the Earth, to our activities, to sentient beings, and deep reverence to those natural forces. It's very difficult to understand the importance of clean agriculture and organic agriculture. Yes, it is possible to have organic farming in small, little counties to begin with. It's a knowledge-intensive system. We need to train the farmers in simple techniques which are hands-on and which utilize the local resources.
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