Context

• Recently, US-based Rockefeller Foundation has selected Naandi Foundation, a Hyderabad based non-profit organisation, as one of the top 10 ‘Visionaries’ in the world for the Food Vision 2050 Prize.

Arakunomics model

• The Rockefeller Foundation award recognised the application of the Arakunomics model in the regions of Araku, Wardha and New Delhi.
• This model leads to the Food Vision 2050 that follows an ‘ABCDEFGH’ framework — Agriculture, Biology, Compost, Decentralised decision-making, Entrepreneurs, Families, Global Markets, and ‘Headstands’, or turning current approaches on their head.

Back to Basics

Arakunomics

• A new integratedeconomic model that ensures profits for farmers, quality for consumers through regenerative agriculture.

• Its success in Araku led to Naandi replicating the model to support the livelihoods of farming communities in the villages of Wardha – infamous for agrarian distress, as well as later in New Delhi, as part of an Urban Farms Co programme.

Regenerative Agriculture

• Describes farming and grazing practices that, among other benefits,reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity – resulting in both carbon drawdown and improving the water cycle.
• Not only “does no harm” to the land but actually improves it,using technologies that regenerate and revitalize the soil and the environment.
• Leads to healthy soil, capable of producing high quality, nutrient dense food while simultaneously improving, rather than degrading land, and ultimately leading to productive farms and healthy communities and economies.
• Dynamic and holistic, incorporating permaculture(sustainable and self-sufficient agricultural ecosystems) and organic farming practices, including conservation tillage, cover crops, crop rotation, composting, mobile animal shelters and pasture cropping, to increase food production, farmers’ income and especially, topsoil.
• It has been promoted to counter loss of the world’s fertile soil and biodiversity, along with the loss of indigenous seeds and knowledge.