Biman Roy grew up in rural India, West Bengal, in the 90s. Having studied all over India and abroad in Sweden, Biman is well aware of what we lose when we disconnect ourselves from nature. According to him, diversity of food is one of the most important connectors. With his organization Bon (which means forest in his local language), he wants to shift the focus of the members of his home community to more diverse food. This will be done by supporting them to grow native crops, introducing kitchen gardening, and creating food forests.
Looking back, I had an amazing childhood. I climbed trees with my friends, swung on the aerial roots of banyan trees, and in the hot summer, spent hours in ponds like buffaloes, ran after dragonflies, foraged for all sorts of wild fruits and berries, played hide-and-seek on haystacks, rode bullock carts, and lots more.
For a long time, I did not realise what an important role these childhood experiences had played in the formation of who I am and what I stand for. One reason for this was being fully immersed in academia. The pursuit of higher studies exposed me to different cities of India. Eventually, when I was 24, it even led me to Sweden for a PhD in Computer Science in 2015. During the time between my late teenage years and my mid-20s, I forgot the close relationship I once had with nature. However, in 2017, this started changing when my partner one day told me, “Track the source of all the food that you consume.”
This simple exercise was an eye-opener: I was eating avocados from Peru, pineapples from Costa Rica,
bananas from Ecuador, and so on. I also learnt that most of the vegetables and fruits that I consumed were grown using industrial-scale farming and that this methodology causes rampant groundwater depletion, pollutes waterbodies through heavy usage of pesticides, degrades topsoil through heavy tilling, etc. All these findings left me aghast! All along, I had been thinking that I was a decent guy who cared for the environment.
The demand that we, the consumers, create is what makes big corporations grow the products at a large scale and as cheaply as possible. However, this comes at a huge cost! And whatever I consume contributes to this system, which, if not changed, will destroy the very planet I claim to love. This is simply unacceptable, and I felt the urge to act. I started downsizing my life, growing vegetables in my own backyard, and buying food from local farmers.
The world of gardening brought a new revelation about me. Since childhood, I have had a focus problem. My mind runs from one thought to another in no time, and this happens every few seconds. I realised that, while gardening, I was able to stay fully focused.
The way our society is shaped, we receive an overload of information every day, which easily leads to increased anxiety levels. This is where mother nature comes in as an equalizer.
While changing individual behaviour was a good start, I knew that it was not enough. All this was happening in a phase of my life when I was seriously questioning my purpose. I visited my home once a year, and in the fashion of a ‘time lapse video’, I noticed how the environment of my village had been negatively affected too. It was then that I realised how blissful my childhood had been. Seeing the disappearance of the lush landscape I grew up in gave me clarity: I needed to stand up with determination to fix the mess that I had contributed to.
By mid-2018, everything started making sense. All these years I’d been away from my village, all these experiences I had undergone, and all the skills I had acquired had happened for a reason. It felt as if destiny was telling me I was meant to come back to my roots and start preserving and protecting the environment.
In my village, agriculture is the main source of livelihood. In the last two decades, the expansion of industrial agriculture has been primarily responsible for destruction of nature. So, to restore the local environment, I want to involve the whole community in practicing agroecological farming.
We are in urgent need of having communities that care deeply about nature. Connecting people with their food is one of the most effective ways of bringing about that change. We at bon envision a world where humans connect with the environment through their food choices. To do so, we will create an environment that makes sure that communities produce and/or consume diverse food. Applying agroecology will show that the agriculture sector and our collective future will be far better off if we work with natural methods. This will bridge the gap between humans and nature that exists now. And I want to play a role in that.
In the next five years, we want to see at least 200 farming families from a region of southern West Bengal (where I grew up) getting involved in agroecology in some form or the other. Agroecology is the application of ecological concepts in agriculture.
Here are the planned activities:
1. We will involve the grandparents and grandchildren of the families to create kitchen gardens. Here, our goal is to show that, with some effort and proper planning, healthy food can be grown. This will reduce dependency on cash crops and improve food security and health.
2. We will work with farmers who want to bring back indigenous crops but are not able to do so because of market forces and several other reasons. Bon will provide support to such farmers through bringing experts and providing market access so that they can switch back to indigenous crops.
3. We will work with people who own properties that are not suitable for crop farming and who don’t directly depend on farming, to create food forests. We at bon imagine a world where farmers work with nature and the environment is protected by the whole community. We believe in prosperity through managing our natural resources in an effective and sustainable way. To achieve this, we will introduce proven solutions that are in practice across the globe and that fit in the local context.
More about bon can be read on: http://bonforest.in/
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