Reviving Vegetable Diversity – A Seed Saver’s Guide
Barely twenty years ago,
around Puducherry, the staple food was fermented ragi and a particular variety
of kambu (Bajra). That variety of kambu is now virtually extinct and today’s
staple food is polished white rice. Traditional varieties of bottle gourds and
pumpkins were commonly seen trailing all over the roofs of village homes. Now
we only see TV cables. Indian farmers had developed around 200,000 varieties of
paddy for hundreds of specific uses and growing conditions. Today they are all
but gone as the Green Revolution introduced dwarf varieties to promote
agri-business. Also the number of vegetable species and the different types of
each vegetable have almost been wiped-out in the past century. But vegetable
diversity is critical to human health and well-being and undeniably, the
nutritive power of a chemically-grown cabbage is not the same as of an
organically-grown one.
Fortunately, some of the
once-rich di...
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