TED Talks Daily - A snack’s journey from the farm to your mouth | Aruna Rangachar Pohl

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

How does a biscuit make it from the farm to your plate? Sustainable development leader Aruna Rangachar Pohl unpacks the long journey of one of India’s most beloved snacks, revealing how the current industrial farming model is eating the planet. Learn about the foundation she started to promote eco-friendly agricultural practices — and hear the success stories of small-scale farmers adopting natural practices to cook up a tasty, healthy and climate-resilient future for everyone.

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. The logic of greening the farming system is this, that making production more sustainable leads to healthier consumption, too. Sustainable development leader Aruna Rangachar-Pole shows how making climate and communities central to food production adds value to producers and consumers. After the break.

Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do. And with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night? Wondering what it means for your business?

Don't miss the latest season of Disruptors, the podcast that takes a closer look at the innovations reshaping our economy. Join RBC's John Stackhouse and Sonia Sinek from Creative Destruction Lab as they ask bold questions like, why is Canada lagging in AI adoption and how to catch up? Don't get left behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this fast-changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

or your favorite podcast platform. And now, our TED Talk of the day. So, we all love biscuits, right? Yes. So join me now on a story and a journey of India's, one of the most popular brands of biscuits. Let's meet Devraj Bhai, a small farmer who grows wheat on his one-hectare farm in arid Gujarat.

This wheat is harvested and trucked 42 kilometers to a government marketplace. And there, it is bought by a trader, who then sells it on 100 kilometers further to a commercial flour mill. At the mill, it is stripped of all of its nutrients and fiber and then converted to refined flour. And then it is dropped another 400 kilometers further to a larger factory to be mixed with refined sugar,

which has had a similar long journey. All of this is mixed with chemical preservatives, artificial flavors, and then baked into biscuits using energy-guzzling machines, and then trucked 500 kilometers back to the same villages. Now, consider this. Devraj Bhai sold his wheat for 22 rupees a kilo, and then he buys this stripped-down, sugary, unhealthy biscuits

for his family at 120 rupees a kilo, almost five times more. This is just the tip of the math iceberg. Underneath lies the hidden world of margins at multiple points, fuel costs, infrastructure costs, and another painful, unaccounted, hidden cost, the cost to nature. All this in the guise of modern efficiency and scale?

What the truck are we not seeing here? This is a tiny example of the highly polluting industrial farming model that is eating the world. Let's zoom out and view this. No escaping it, India is the world's most populous country. Yet it is still pretty low, among the lowest in terms of per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Now, for an India under construction, rapidly modernizing, this is the fifth largest economy, shortly to be the fourth. For Indians on consumption steroids,

it is third in terms of purchasing power parity, a story of growth that is inexorably interlinked with global warming. How green is our current or future? As brown as my face, friends, contributing 20% to this browning of the planet is agriculture, with over half the country's workforce engaged in it. Staring us in the face is this absolute imperative to power green production and empower green consumption,

a daunting task for India's 150 million small farmers who own less than two hectares of land. Now, I grew up in awe of nature as I tagged along with my civil engineer father in the deepest jungles of India. My mother, she taught me respect for indigenous foods, cultures and the kinship of communities. A 25-year digression into the modern food industry,

traveling the world was a rollercoaster ride five-year digression into the modern food industry, traveling the world was a rollercoaster ride of the good, the bad and the ugly of what the farmer grows to what lands up on a consumer's plate. So my midlife crisis coincided with the climate crisis, and that motivated me to set up India Foundation for Humanistic Development with a vision to rejuvenate productive landscapes equitably and sustainably. We work with small farmers across India,

as well as indigenous communities in 22 states to promote natural farming, green enterprise development, and habitat conservation. I see my work as knitting, knitting a patchwork quilt of stories of communities, their challenges, and the changemakers, and, you know, presenting this vibrant, multi-hued,

expanding and evolving saga to the powers that be. And I would like to now take you, as I zoom in, to the powers that be. And... I would like to now take you, as I zoom in, on a golden patch in Belgaum district of Karnataka in the south, where the heroes of my story are 10,000 small farmers. This story brings to life how green production can lead to green consumption in a more equitable and sustainable way. Let's meet Anand. He's a small farmer growing maize in Belgao on a two-hectare farm. Anand is also the proud managing director

of Saudati Farmer Producer Company Limited. Saudati Company has 1,000 farmers like our Anand, who are shareholders and co-owners. Their collective strength allows them to operate at scale, to raise finance, to bulk purchase farm inputs, to eliminate middlemen, and then to trade directly with big buyers for higher prices.

By improving their farming efficiency, the Saudati farmers are earning at least 25% more and break away from high-interest microloans that they needed before. They also get better-than-market prizes for their produce from Anand and his team during season. Now, the profits from Saudati Company are invested back into the company or distributed to the farmer shareholders

at the end of the year, and this is a decision that is jointly taken. How green is my valley? To know this, and the We have changed from a based monocrop agriculture to an organic, multi-crop farming system at scale through our natural farming trainings. We track and trace their production practices through an app called FoodSign, which allows us to capture the tons of carbon that is sequestered on their lands.

This is then traded to earn carbon revenues to create assets that would benefit the whole community. This could be a production facility, this could be a common warehouse, or a primary health center, or even a drinking water facility. Their decision. Now, it does pay to green production, right?

Let's now meet the heroines of my story, who power the green production to green consumption pipeline. Meet Kamala and her 12-member self-help group, who are shareholders of Saudati, and they run a micro-enterprise. And yeah, they produce biscuits. Whole wheat and millet flour is mixed with jaggery. Jaggery is an iron-rich brown sugar. This is baked in ovens that run on solar or biomass energy, simply packed and sold locally. Our doorstep incubator program supports nine such pharma producer companies

with 9,000 shareholders in Belgao district who are linked to 150 microenterprises which are run by women and youth, who just add value to local produce for local markets using renewable energy. Let's step back and think a bit. Do you see the simple, fantastic math happening here? Think of it. Do you see the simple, fantastic math happening here?

A lone two-hectare subsistence farmer transforms into this joint venture of 10,000 farmers managing 20,000 hectares of produce and earning multimillion rupees. A local, circular food economy that has the impact to benefit a whole district with a million population. Mind-boggling, but doable.

This scenario is something that can be repeated, replicated a hundred thousand times across India. And secure the right to affordable, sufficient and culturally appropriate food for a billion Indians. This is a reset button that connects culture to policy and to reverse and repair a broken food system to a green and fair food system.

There are three things that unpin all that we do to let a thousand Belgams bloom. One is a farming system that is climate resilient, uses existing natural resources to improve productivity and farm incomes, just as our 10,000 farmers are showing us. Two, a production system that adds value close to source and conserves natural resources

as well as allocates fair value to producer as well as consumer. We do know, I think, by now, that Kamala's biscuits are surely tastier and healthier for our kids, right? Three, a value system that protects nature and people's rights. The 10 farmer-producer companies with their communities in Belgaum are a living example of equitable ownership and joint decision-making. In Sanskrit, in India's oldest language,

we say, vasudhaiva kutumbakam. This means, the world is one family. Showing up where and when it matters, sharing and caring, is my family trait. For me, this means the world of food is in our collective hands.

And we must, we should, learn to value food from the lens of climate and communities. You can do this by connecting to the journey of food and choosing what lands up in your shopping cart. Will you? Pretty please? Pretty please? Thank you. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb?

It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. That was Aruna Rangachar-Pole at the TED Countdown Summit in 2023. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan.

Additional support from Emma Taubner, Daniela Balarezo, and Will Hennessey. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED Games.