Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Biowin
Biowin is a one of the projects of WSSS, a company created to process and market the products of the thousands of organic farmers they work with. It is very much like Vanamoolika, only on a grander scale. Being a social enterprise, the farmers are ensured their fair share. More than that, they are valued and respected as partners in a system. (Not the usual treatment for farmers in this part of the world.) Any profits yielded by Biowin are cycled back to the community in the form of education sponsorships for 600 families.
On entering the reception room, we were briefly greeted by Fr. Rajeesh Mathew, the Associate Director, but it was Jojo who gave us the rundown. Jojo’s job is to receive visitors. I’m sure of this because he immediately sat us down and went straight into “the speech.” It was anything but boring, however, having undoubtedly been through countless revisions. I’ll go ahead and share it with you, leaving out my occasional interruptions to attempt a joke, at which his expression read, “Oh, these Americans!”
Here we go.
WSSS wants to improve the standard of living of the people, especially farmers. The main crops in Wayanad are coffee and pepper, so WSSS trains them how to grow it organically according to the standards of our buyers who are all from Europe. Farmers sell their crop to WSSS and WSSS processes it and ships it directly to Europe. So, you can say we are the middleman, but with a heart, because we want to see the farmers prosper, and give them a good and fair price. We work with 19,400 farmers. WSSS has three certifications. One is Fair Trade, for the sake of the community and the environment. The second is Organic, for product quality, and the third is Rainforest Alliance for the sake of the environment.
Here I cut in, not with a joke, but with a question. I wanted to know if he had heard of the PGS system which some ARI graduates are experimenting with. PGS stands for Participatory Guarantee System and can be an alternative to Fair Trade Certification, where, instead of an outside certification body, the community itself sets and follows the organic standards based on trust relationships with the buyers. Jojo answered that PGS is used when people can’t afford or don’t want to pay the high costs of certification. The product is cheaper that way. Certification itself is a for-profit business! I believe there is more to it than this, but this was not the time to discuss it.
This factory is called Biowin and it is a registered company under WSSS, handling organic agriculture, processing, and marketing. Robusta coffee accounts for 70-80% of sales. They buy the dried cherry, process it, and sell it to Europe.
PT John piped in that back in the 1980s the Indian government controlled all coffee. Farmers could only sell to the government, and only the government could export it.
Next come the spices – particularly pepper, turmeric, and ginger. These are processed in a separate building so as not to affect each other’s flavor. There are three hazards when processing foods. (1) Biological – meaning pathogens. Cooking or sterilizing takes care of this. (2) Physical – which includes glass, stones, twigs, etc. These are managed using special cleaning machines, magnets, and other techniques. I remember visiting a tea factory in Myanmar, where cleaning was done by hand – slowly and meticulously. I’ll bet they wish they had some of these machines! (3) Chemical – there is no form of processing and no machine that can remove chemicals from food. The only way to handle this is to not put the chemicals there in the first place. This means using no pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides, etc. while farming. Only organic!
The factory tour was just a walk around the buildings. For hygienic and possibly secrecy reasons, we couldn’t enter and see things in detail. Through a few open doors, I could glimpse some of the machines, though. They were huge. What an operation. This place and Vanamoolika are pictures of the dream of many of our graduates – to work with farmers to grow a high value product, run their own processing facility, and have stable buyers. The buyers don’t have to be overseas. Domestic is also fine. But getting all these elements in place is not easy. There are innumerable factors that can mess it all up, and probably the biggest of these is greed. In my job as Graduate Outreach Coordinator I try to link up graduates so they can learn from each other and share ideas, so I will be sure to tell them about these places.
A few words from PT John
As I mentioned before, PT John is quite the talker, so I jotted down a few of his stories and assorted facts, in no particular order. I found the elephant one was particularly interesting.
The government of the state of Kerala is communist. This he noted as we passed a red and gold hammer and sickle flag. How about that?
Nagaland is the only state in India where the people (the tribal communities) own the land. In all other states, the land is in a person’s name, but the real owner is the Indian Government. I did a quick fact check and to some degree this seems both true and not true. It’s another one of those “kind of” situations. The main thing that caught my attention about this is that we have more than fifty graduates in Nagaland. It is a beautiful and mysterious part of our world that no one has ever heard of. Maybe I’ll take you there one day.
Wild animal attacks are on the rise (like Siby said.) They are being reported in the papers almost daily. It’s because there is not enough food in the forests, which have become monoculture plantations, rather than healthy biodiverse forests.
PT John’s farm was frequently attacked by elephants, so he built a fence. But not just any fence. It was a special fence. There is almost no kind of fence that can be built on a farmer’s budget that will keep an elephant out. They are big and they are smart! So, PT John built a honey bee fence. He set up hanging beehives at intervals and strung them together with wire. If the elephant touches a wire, it will disturb the bees and his trunk gets stung. This was his reckoning, but it played out little differently. Somehow, the elephants could sense the danger and didn’t even approach. He presented this unique idea to the local government, seeing it as a good option for farmers, and the honey brings extra income. For some reason, those government officers were not too keen on it.
Lunch at a Nice Restaurant
For lunch we headed to … a Nice Restaurant. It must be the nicest one in town. Today’s spread was the biggest ever, and a treat from all of them! By watching and asking, I am learning the order in which to eat each curry, to experience each taste in turn. I’m on my way to becoming a curry connoisseur!
By the way, Roy David (2003 ARI Graduate) met us at Biowin and joined us all for lunch. He will be taking me to Karnataka State where I will be spending the next few days learning about his lifetime of work, filling this log with more pages of exciting tales. Note that he also makes good use of two names, but from time to time, he does go by just Roy.
The Hume Center
Our last visit for the day was the Hume Center in Kalpetta, a beautiful hilly region, adorned in lush green. On our way there, we passed dozens of workers constructing a stone wall along the road. In India, humans, rather than machinery, still do a lot of the heavy work. I think the priority lies in giving a person a job.
As soon as we arrived, we were warmly met by Vishnudas, the director, and his wife Suma, who started there as a journalist. As they led us to their office, I couldn’t help but notice all the quotes around the walls. My favorite was, “Ask the right questions and nature will open the doors to her secrets.” Both of them knew Naran through his work with the Adivasi, having spent a year analyzing major tribal development programs to learn from the communities’ own voices how these projects were going.
As soon as we sat down Suma began energetically telling us about this place. First of all, it’s full name is the Hume Center for Ecology and Wildlife Biology, named after Allan Octavian Hume, a famous British naturalist and ornithologist who devoted the whole of his life to studying these things in India. If he were alive today, he would be 195 years old. I found that little fact on their Facebook page.
With Suma as the main storyteller, and Vishnudas playing the role of active supporter, together they explained about three programs, the first being climate change. Since Wayanad is at a high altitude, it’s crops and spices are sensitive to microclimates, especially cardamom. This has earned it the name “climate vulnerable district.” So, the center works with the community to create science-based solutions for climate change. For example, they are attempting to adapt to the higher temperatures by introducing rice varieties that are more heat resistant.
Cloudburst mapping
In recent years Wayanad has been experiencing deluge rainfalls which were not at all common before. In 2024 there was a major landslide in which people lost their lives and homes. From 2018 the Hume Center has been mapping rainfall across the district to identify specific areas of “high intensity rain.” With the help of rain measuring volunteers in every nook and cranny of the land, they produced a detailed map which outlines danger zones for flooding and landslides. This map has been shared with the government, so that early warning systems could be made. Other districts have begun to replicate their work, but a lot more rain gauges are needed!
Tigers and people
The next program deals with the issue of human and wildlife conflict. As you can see, this story is slowly revealing itself and with each new person I talk to, I learn a little more. Suma described it as a second-generation problem of animal conservation. Successful conservation means an increase in wildlife. Here in Wayanad the tiger population has increased from 16 to 18, which for these big cats, is quite significant. Now, the people have to figure out how to co-exist with them. For the Adivasi, who live closest to these tigers, there are no problems. No attacks. They know the warning signs. They always know if a tiger is nearby and vice versa. They can smell each other from a hundred meters away. But villagers and farmers don’t know. Old tigers or defeated tigers will go to the forest boundary to eat cattle and sometimes they attack humans. Now, there are people who don’t want to “save the tigers” anymore.
The problem stems from the fact that successful conservation is not only about protecting the tigers, but protecting their habitat as well. Today’s forests are not really forests anymore, but plantations, where only teak, acacia, and eucalyptus are growing. They produce no food for deer and other animals. With nothing for the tigers to eat, they go roaming into the environs of people and domestic animals. The Government Forest Department and the Plantation Owners claim they are protecting the forest, but their trees produce nothing but money.
Eco-theater and climate cadets
The last program, and the one that really had me sitting up in my chair, was their education program. They go full on creative with this, with things like eco-theater as a way to study conservation. They have the kids imagine their body is the body of an animal. How would they look, feel, move?
Suma described a four day “Soil is Life” program in which the children learn about the living soil. At the start, they think of the soil as “just dirt.” But by the end they are drawing pictures of all the life and micro-organism that live beneath their feet. They are asked questions, like “Imagine you are a root – what do you see?” Each day, the students go out to the forest on an activity or just to observe and then come back to add something new to a large banner being created by each team. By the end, they have drawn a story of the soil.
Focusing on kids in grades 6-12 standard, they also teach them how to analyze problems systematically and scientifically, but in a way that makes it meaningful. For example, when they ask the students what they know about climate change, their answers will all be the same. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Then they give them a rain gauge and teach them how to measure and observe the rain and ask how that relates to the landslides they have been experiencing. Next, they encourage the kids to come up with their own questions and develop their own experiments and then share their findings in creative and artistic ways.
Children participating in this particular program are called Climate Cadets. They spend an entire year doing projects and collecting information for a big presentation. Ten from each school participate, including tribals (Adivasi) who sometimes don’t even speak the same language. The Adivasis tend to be quiet and reserved, but one day their task was to find crabs in the river. The city kids couldn’t find them at all, but the Adivasi new exactly where to look and ran ahead, leading the others to the best spots.
The more I heard the more I liked everything they do at the Hume Center. Their passion was contagious. I wish I could have joined one of their lessons, or seen the kids’ presentations. Of course, I shared about ARI as well, and showed our documentary and they immediately saw the similarities in our values. Remember that “living soil?” What an inspiring afternoon. I definitely want to keep this connection.
A dad joke
On the way back we stopped off for tea. Roy David suggested I try a Masala Dosa which they were making fresh, in a crepe style method. A dosa is kind of like a thin pancake, and the masala upgrade means the inclusion of potato. Roy David remembers a lot of Japanese words and liked to throw them into our conversation. Thus, he asserted that “dosa is oishi and masala dosa is totemo oishi.” That means “delicious” and “very delicious.” I think you might call this an “oyaji gyagu” – Japanese for “dad joke.”
