A First-Person Note based on Two Decades of Active Work in this Sector
How many natural farmers are there in Tamil Nadu? This is the most nagging question that often does not have clear answers because nobody measures it.
One would assume that Agricultural Department will know this, unfortunately they have been paying lip-service to promotion of Organic Farming in the state for so long, it is a negligible line item in their annual budget almost as an afterthought. From only talking about the awarding of organic farmers (for what? ) in the name of Nammalvar and giving incentives to farmers to grow traditional varieties of paddy in the name of Jayaraman, last year, this year budget has some provisions for ''model'' being established (this state has several decades old technologies still being modelled and piloted!!) the entire organic outlook of the government has been populist and not systemic.
The only way one can understand the total number of organic farmers is through the data that is available with certifying agencies. This could be misleading, as there are many leading organic farmers that I know who do not believe in certification and do not in any way get certified. These obviously will be left out of the entire spectrum of organic farming counting in the state and country. So, I looked up the total number of certified land (no. of farmers is even more tricky issue, I will come to that later in this report) that is organic (in whatever stage) in the state. If one were to take the total cropped area o the state as per what was presented in the agricultural budget of 2024-25, roughly the land under various forms of organic certification adds upto about 2.17%. That is it. Be aware that this could easily shift one way or other by 1%, as there are seasonal and annual variations[1]. One can safely say that the land under organic farming has averaged around 1-2% since over a decade now, not more than that.
Out of this is the large PGS certification that has been given a push by several NGOs and the rural development department which constitutes to about 41% of the overall certified area, 33% of the certified land is under third party certification, this one may presume is predominantly the export market oriented people (mostly medium and large farmers or well organized small farmer aggregators) and another 26% certified by the department of organic certification of the state government that functions under the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU).
If one were to look at the total production of organic products as a percentage of the overall food production in the state, that is an abysmal 0.23% as of last available PGS data (which includes the produce from forest produce as well). As TNCERT does not provide data on the yield data, and it is difficult ascertain from the third-party amount, the above 0.23% is based on the PGS data alone. If one were to even think in terms of three times more in terms of productivity, organic produce would still add up to less than 1% of the total food produced in the state.
Then how many natural / organic farmers are there in the state? For this we need to understand a bit about the land holding pattern in this state. While certification is a regulatory need if one were to market in certain spaces, the ownership of land, its usage (or not) in any given season is not easily tracked by any system leaving space for much speculation. Tamil Nadu has a land holding pattern (although this data cited by the latest Policy Document by the Govt of TN, is based on a record that is at least 3 yrs old and compiled from records which are another 3 yrs old), is predominantly marginal and small. Marginal farmers are those who own land under 2.4 acres and small are people who may own anywhere between 2.4 to 5 acres of land. They constitute 93% of the state land ownership with a combined holding of about 62% of the land in the state. The remaining 38% of the land is held by the semi-medium, medium and large farmers, with the large farmers, owning over 25 acres of land, holding about 5% of the farmland in the state. If one were to speculate on the area under various forms of certification and prorate it across the different land holding categories (though this method too can be challenged) for the sake of simplicity, Tamil Nadu may have about 1.3 lakh natural farmers in various stages of conversion / practice. Out of the 79.38 lakh land holders (of the 59.71 lakh ha) this is approx. about 1.63% of farmers who can be counted as practicing natural or organic farming.
So, to summarize this before I proceed further – Out of the total agricultural land in Tamil Nadu roughly about 2% is under some form of organic / natural cultivation, from the land that is held by approx. about 1.6% of the land holders in the state, producing less than 1% of the food in the state.
Like I mentioned earlier, even arriving at this number requires effort to source data from diverse groups, analysis and speculation. Every thing from units of measurement, period of data, categories and file formats are held in diverse manner on this. So, this number can be challenged by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. But having such a number provides us with some clarity on what we are talking about. Unfortunately, this is the number that most people who are working in this sector will not even speculate about. While activists and promoters will talk about a ‘’large number of organic farmers in the state (one of them told me that she has converted about 20 lakh farmers, and this was about 5 yrs back)’’, the skeptical agricultural scientists / academician may talk about the ‘’unsustainability of the farm sector’’, the ignorant bureaucrat may cite the ‘’Sri Lankan failure’’ with an air of authoritative concern, and the business minded may talk about the ‘’huge opportunity’’ in the foreign markets for the organic produce that the state can provide. All of them in their silos will be justified, and, yet, mis-representing the larger reality of what is happening in the state.
I will write more about the potential and possibility in the next article…
This is second article in the series, the first article in the series is here
[1] Normally agricultural land use pattern changes are seen in a decadal manner to understand the differences. For instance, the TNCERT / NPOP certification saw a negative growth in 17 districts last year alone.
Add new comment