Preserve soil quality for better health, says ‘seed mother’

Panaji: Padma Shri awardee Rahibai Soma Popere, known as the ‘seed mother’, on Monday said that only if natural farming methods, free of chemicals, are adopted, then it will result in an immediate improvement in the health of the population of the country.
Illiterate and one of many siblings, Rahibai said she never stepped inside a school, as she was involved in working in her family farm since childhood. But today she has helped preserve indigenous seeds of 114 varieties of 53 crops.
“I never went to a school but learnt everything I needed to know from the school of nature. After my mother passed away, when I was a child, the responsibility of my siblings fell on my shoulder. But when my father was doing natural farming, I never remember having to go to the doctor or take medications ever, despite the hard life,” said Popere, who was speaking as part of the International Biodiversity Day celebrations organized on Monday by the state environment ministry and the Goa State Biodiversity Board at Neura panchayat hall.
“Suddenly I saw that my grandchildren and other children around me were constantly sick and malnourished. To enhance their yield, farmers were using chemicals and pesticides indiscriminately in my village. That is when I realised it is time to return to the old methods and started collecting the seeds,” said Popere, belonging to a small tribal village in Ahmednagar, Akola, Maharashtra.
She said she eventually realised that she will have to spread the movement and began convincing other farmers to return to native varieties of crops and give up chemical fertilisers.
“I have come to Goa because I want you’ll to spread this change in Goa too. We are destroying our forests without thinking. They hold tremendous medicinal diversity. Only if we preserve the quality of our soil then we can preserve our future,” said Popere.
Member secretary of Goa State Biodiversity Board Pradip Sarmokadam said that Goa too has started a seed bank in a small way at Curtorim to preserve indigenous seeds. “The issue of seed sovereignty is on around the world today. A seed is not just a seed but economy,” he said.
Minister for environment Nilesh Cabral said that Goa is among few states where the people’s biodiversity registers (PBR), recording flora and fauna diversity in each village, have gone through three stages of verification and validation.