EATON: On May 25th, 2009 Cyclone Aila slammed into the Ganges River delta on the coast of Bangladesh and India. Hundreds of thousands fled as the storm surge tore through earthen embankments and flooded rice fields with a wall of sea water.
8110, 8107, 8096, 8100 etc... (shots of Sam and Dr. Ghosh...)
EATON: I traveled to Eastern India with ecologist Asish Ghosh to see how the more than four million people living in this vast river delta are adapting to the salty soils the storm left behind. It’s been four years since the cyclone hit. And farmer Raj Krishna Das says growing enough food is still a struggle.
(Krishna talking followed by Ghosh’s translation:)
(8150-synced 11:25) So he even cannot have any vegetable growing after Aila because still there is salt in the soil...
EATON: This is what climate change looks like for the densely populated river deltas of the world. They hold some of the most productive farmland on the planet. But it’s also some of the most threatened.
GHOSH 8112 (looking at map)
8113 (0:39-0:43) ...we have lost this amount of land on all sides of the island.
EATON: Today this delta coastline is retreating more than 600 feet a year... and the salt is encroaching even farther inland. As farmers here adapt to rising sea levels and more powerful storms, they become a case study for how to produce food on a warming planet. But their solution may come as a surprise. The only thing that will grow in Das’s field today is a salt tolerant rice variety developed more than a century ago by small-scale farmers just like him.
GHOSH (8150-synched 10:55) He thinks it is one of the biggest resources he has got. It is more precious than gold to him.
EATON: Ghosh’s Center for Environmental Development and other nonprofits are trying to reintroduce these traditional seeds, which became rare after farmers began adopting modern, high-yielding varieties in the 1960’s. So-called “Green Revolution” varieties that could double, or even triple their rice harvest given the right conditions and chemical inputs. But these same seeds were the first to fail after Cyclone Aila doused the soil with salt water.
GHOSH (8154-synced, 0:26) Aila changed everything. He lost his home, he lost his possession.
EATON: Starting over with only a handful of the old, salt tolerant seeds, farmers like Das have labored for three years to grow enough rice to ward off hunger.
GHOSH (8154-synced, 1:05-1:19) Now he’s confident he’s got enough seeds to cover his land. So I think the story between the last three years has changed from a story of despair to a story of hope in future…
8513-8517, 8520-8523, 8528, 8529 (seed shots)
EATON: But the struggle to survive after the cyclone also offers a stark warning about how much this genetic legacy in agriculture has been lost. Scientist Debal Deb has spent more than decade traveling across India trying to save what’s left of these traditional seeds.
DEB (8518-synced, 0:20...) This is sterile lema (phonetic)...
EATON: Farmers in India once cultivated more than a hundred thousand distinct varieties of rice alone. Most of those are now lost forever. But here on this small nonprofit seed farm in Eastern India, Deb is propagating nearly a thousand of them and distributing the seeds free of charge, including the salt tolerant variety farmers are now growing in the Ganges River Delta. Deb says many of these seeds are ideally suited to the extreme and unpredictable conditions of the future.
DEB (8716-synced 11:20) My own collection I have more than 200 varieties, some of which can withstand drought and can yield something on zero irrigation. Some varieties which can withstand 12 feet deep water for three months and the stem will elongate and still give some yield. And we have at least six varieties of salt tolerant rice which can withstand sea water intrusion... (14:46) These are the unique properties which genetic engineers have not yet imagined.
EATON Despite the billions of dollars spent by governments and agribusiness on plant breeding programs and genetic engineering, Deb says these programs have yet to create new seeds that can rival the traditional varieties’ tolerance for extreme conditions. And as global temperatures continue to rise, even the most ardent defenders of the Green Revolution are now realizing how essential these traditional varieties are for the future of agriculture.
(IRRI rice field B-roll..)
EATON: That Green Revolution began thousands of miles away, in the Philippines, at the International Rice Research Institute. Now scientists here are trying to breed new seeds that will withstand the stresses of climate change.
(b-roll of IRRI seed vault 4745-4747)
EATON: The Institute has stored tens of thousands of the world’s traditional rice varieties in its frozen seed vaults as a genetic pallette for future seeds. But many of these seeds were collected in the 1960’s. And after being stored for so long they may no longer be viable for breeding. That means Debal Deb’s grassroots seed farm back in India may be one of the most valuable genetic resources left.
Still, scientists say simply reintroducing old varieties isn’t going to feed the world -- they just don’t produce enough. They’re working to build new varieties using the genetic information embedded in the traditional seeds. M.S. Swaminathan is considered the father of India’s Green Revolution.
SWAMINATHAN (8557-synced, 3:35) There is no other alternative in this country. Land is going out of agriculture. In fact, the farms where I had demonstration 40 years ago they all disappeared. They have become big malls. They have become big shops and so on and hotels. So land is a shrinking resource. We have to produce more and more from less and less land, less and less water. That means we need the Green Revolution approach -- productivity improvement approach.
EATON: The International Rice Research Institute HAS successfully bred some climate resilient traits from the traditional varieties into a single high yielding seed. The new plants are designed to tolerate limited amounts of drought and flooding during the same growing season. So far the Institute has distributed them to more than four million farmers.
STANDUP (8715-synced): In even the remotest parts of India the Green Revolution caused many farmers to abandon their traditional seeds for the modern, high yielding varieties promoted by the government. But for those who didn’t the benefits of these locally adapted seeds are becoming more and more pronounced.
8662-synced (Nauri singing... play under...)
EATON: 64 year old farmer Loknath Nauri, grows 30 different traditional varieties of rice, millet, corn, squash and lentils on his two acre plot in Eastern India. His song is a celebration of the diversity of traditional seeds and the happiness it brings to his family and his land. These seeds, created over thousands of years, don’t just have the genes to withstand droughts and floods. They’re also adapted to local soils and pests, eliminating the need for costly nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides. Some are so resilient they sprout even in the dry months.
NAURI/VO (8667-synced, 0:51) Look at this pearl millet. We cut it last December. There hasn’t been any rain for 5 months. And it’s sending up new shoots. This would never happen with a high yielding variety. Once the rains come we don’t even have to reseed it. It just grows back by itself for two to three years.
EATON: Nauri says he tried the new rice seeds but his harvest didn’t even come close to the traditional varieties.
NAURI VO (8660-synced, 1:13-1:26) I tried planting that high yielding rice one year. But I didn’t have money to pay for the chemical fertilizers. And without them, it wouldn’t grow. So I went back to the traditional varieties.
EATON: The search continues for ways to feed nine billion people on a climate-changed planet. The new super seeds scientists are developing could transform agriculture in the years to come. But for now many of the world's poorest farmers are turning to the seeds that sustained their ancestors as a sort of genetic insurance policy against an unpredictable future.
8110, 8107, 8096, 8100 etc... (shots of Sam and Dr. Ghosh...)
EATON: I traveled to Eastern India with ecologist Asish Ghosh to see how the more than four million people living in this vast river delta are adapting to the salty soils the storm left behind. It’s been four years since the cyclone hit. And farmer Raj Krishna Das says growing enough food is still a struggle.
(Krishna talking followed by Ghosh’s translation:)
(8150-synced 11:25) So he even cannot have any vegetable growing after Aila because still there is salt in the soil...
EATON: This is what climate change looks like for the densely populated river deltas of the world. They hold some of the most productive farmland on the planet. But it’s also some of the most threatened.
GHOSH 8112 (looking at map)
8113 (0:39-0:43) ...we have lost this amount of land on all sides of the island.
EATON: Today this delta coastline is retreating more than 600 feet a year... and the salt is encroaching even farther inland. As farmers here adapt to rising sea levels and more powerful storms, they become a case study for how to produce food on a warming planet. But their solution may come as a surprise. The only thing that will grow in Das’s field today is a salt tolerant rice variety developed more than a century ago by small-scale farmers just like him.
GHOSH (8150-synched 10:55) He thinks it is one of the biggest resources he has got. It is more precious than gold to him.
EATON: Ghosh’s Center for Environmental Development and other nonprofits are trying to reintroduce these traditional seeds, which became rare after farmers began adopting modern, high-yielding varieties in the 1960’s. So-called “Green Revolution” varieties that could double, or even triple their rice harvest given the right conditions and chemical inputs. But these same seeds were the first to fail after Cyclone Aila doused the soil with salt water.
GHOSH (8154-synced, 0:26) Aila changed everything. He lost his home, he lost his possession.
EATON: Starting over with only a handful of the old, salt tolerant seeds, farmers like Das have labored for three years to grow enough rice to ward off hunger.
GHOSH (8154-synced, 1:05-1:19) Now he’s confident he’s got enough seeds to cover his land. So I think the story between the last three years has changed from a story of despair to a story of hope in future…
8513-8517, 8520-8523, 8528, 8529 (seed shots)
EATON: But the struggle to survive after the cyclone also offers a stark warning about how much this genetic legacy in agriculture has been lost. Scientist Debal Deb has spent more than decade traveling across India trying to save what’s left of these traditional seeds.
DEB (8518-synced, 0:20...) This is sterile lema (phonetic)...
EATON: Farmers in India once cultivated more than a hundred thousand distinct varieties of rice alone. Most of those are now lost forever. But here on this small nonprofit seed farm in Eastern India, Deb is propagating nearly a thousand of them and distributing the seeds free of charge, including the salt tolerant variety farmers are now growing in the Ganges River Delta. Deb says many of these seeds are ideally suited to the extreme and unpredictable conditions of the future.
DEB (8716-synced 11:20) My own collection I have more than 200 varieties, some of which can withstand drought and can yield something on zero irrigation. Some varieties which can withstand 12 feet deep water for three months and the stem will elongate and still give some yield. And we have at least six varieties of salt tolerant rice which can withstand sea water intrusion... (14:46) These are the unique properties which genetic engineers have not yet imagined.
EATON Despite the billions of dollars spent by governments and agribusiness on plant breeding programs and genetic engineering, Deb says these programs have yet to create new seeds that can rival the traditional varieties’ tolerance for extreme conditions. And as global temperatures continue to rise, even the most ardent defenders of the Green Revolution are now realizing how essential these traditional varieties are for the future of agriculture.
(IRRI rice field B-roll..)
EATON: That Green Revolution began thousands of miles away, in the Philippines, at the International Rice Research Institute. Now scientists here are trying to breed new seeds that will withstand the stresses of climate change.
(b-roll of IRRI seed vault 4745-4747)
EATON: The Institute has stored tens of thousands of the world’s traditional rice varieties in its frozen seed vaults as a genetic pallette for future seeds. But many of these seeds were collected in the 1960’s. And after being stored for so long they may no longer be viable for breeding. That means Debal Deb’s grassroots seed farm back in India may be one of the most valuable genetic resources left.
Still, scientists say simply reintroducing old varieties isn’t going to feed the world -- they just don’t produce enough. They’re working to build new varieties using the genetic information embedded in the traditional seeds. M.S. Swaminathan is considered the father of India’s Green Revolution.
SWAMINATHAN (8557-synced, 3:35) There is no other alternative in this country. Land is going out of agriculture. In fact, the farms where I had demonstration 40 years ago they all disappeared. They have become big malls. They have become big shops and so on and hotels. So land is a shrinking resource. We have to produce more and more from less and less land, less and less water. That means we need the Green Revolution approach -- productivity improvement approach.
EATON: The International Rice Research Institute HAS successfully bred some climate resilient traits from the traditional varieties into a single high yielding seed. The new plants are designed to tolerate limited amounts of drought and flooding during the same growing season. So far the Institute has distributed them to more than four million farmers.
STANDUP (8715-synced): In even the remotest parts of India the Green Revolution caused many farmers to abandon their traditional seeds for the modern, high yielding varieties promoted by the government. But for those who didn’t the benefits of these locally adapted seeds are becoming more and more pronounced.
8662-synced (Nauri singing... play under...)
EATON: 64 year old farmer Loknath Nauri, grows 30 different traditional varieties of rice, millet, corn, squash and lentils on his two acre plot in Eastern India. His song is a celebration of the diversity of traditional seeds and the happiness it brings to his family and his land. These seeds, created over thousands of years, don’t just have the genes to withstand droughts and floods. They’re also adapted to local soils and pests, eliminating the need for costly nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides. Some are so resilient they sprout even in the dry months.
NAURI/VO (8667-synced, 0:51) Look at this pearl millet. We cut it last December. There hasn’t been any rain for 5 months. And it’s sending up new shoots. This would never happen with a high yielding variety. Once the rains come we don’t even have to reseed it. It just grows back by itself for two to three years.
EATON: Nauri says he tried the new rice seeds but his harvest didn’t even come close to the traditional varieties.
NAURI VO (8660-synced, 1:13-1:26) I tried planting that high yielding rice one year. But I didn’t have money to pay for the chemical fertilizers. And without them, it wouldn’t grow. So I went back to the traditional varieties.
EATON: The search continues for ways to feed nine billion people on a climate-changed planet. The new super seeds scientists are developing could transform agriculture in the years to come. But for now many of the world's poorest farmers are turning to the seeds that sustained their ancestors as a sort of genetic insurance policy against an unpredictable future.