ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces an ongoing ethnographic project on situated responses to agrarian crisis in the rural district of Wayanad, Kerala. In this project, I look at alternative agricultures that have emerged in response to a protracted crisis of commercial agriculture – a crisis that has repeatedly caused many smallholders to proclaim that agriculture has ‘gone’ (poyi) from the region. This chapter focuses on a particular response to the crisis: a natural farming movement, the so-called Zero Budget Natural Farming method (henceforth ZBNF), which came to Wayanad around 2006 at a time when the district made headlines for high incidences of farmers’ suicides (Münster 2012). Within the larger picture of the political economy of agrarian transition in India, this chapter argues that agro-ecological movements and movements for food sovereignty, even if they operate within dubious ideological idioms, constitute important allies for the creation of a possible agrarian future in India – a future that I believe hinges on a necessary agro-ecological transition.
