India is a land rich in biodiversity. For over 10,000 years, Indian farmers have used their brilliance and indigenous knowledge to domesticate and evolve thousands of crops including 200,000 varieties of rice, 1,500 of wheat, 1,500 of bananas and mangoes, hundreds of types of dals, oilseeds, diverse millets, pseudo cereals, vegetables and spices of every kind. This brilliance in breeding was abruptly stopped when the Green Revolution was imposed on us in the 1960s by the chemical industry with its roots in the war. As in the colonisation of the past, our intelligence in seed breeding and agriculture was denied. Our seeds were called “primitive” and displaced. A mechanical “intelligence” of industrial breeding for uniformity for external inputs was imposed. Instead of continuing to evolve varieties of diverse species, our agriculture and our diet were reduced to rice and wheat.
