Beejaya (බීජය): Agroecological Futures from South Asia

Beejaya, in Sinhala, means a seed.

Image by Alifiya Mutaher

The Problem Beneath the Soil

Agroecology is having its moment, neatly packaged, polished, and stripped of its teeth. Rebranded as a greener input, a marketing label, a softer edge to the same industrial field. But when contracts collapse and the mitti (મિટ્ટી / मिट्टी / soil) itself blows away, what good is a greener sticker? When healing becomes a metric, and care is counted in compliance forms, what exactly are we saving? The soil of these discussions is thin, and it continues thinning.

Agroecology is not a new technique waiting to be scaled. It is an old question that remains unresolved: who gets to farm, on what land, with whose knowledge, and under what terms? Solutions are easier to package when they don’t threaten the roots of the problem.

In South Asia, agroecological practices run deep with seed rituals, cropping rhythms, and memory held in kitchens and fields. But inheritance is no sanctuary. These practices survive on contested terrain: caste-determined land, gendered care burdens, corporate appropriation dressed as "nature-based," and states eager to greenwash extraction as renewal.

This provocation does not aim to define agroecology, or to polish it into another development tagline. But for clarity, we hold it as more than a technique. We think of it as a worldview. Agroecology is a way of tending to land, time, and interdependence that centres care, justice, and ecological memory. It is not just how we grow food, but how we relate to what nourishes us and on what terms.

This note is part of Lagori’s South Asian Futures work, a framework-in-progress, that asks how futures thinking can be rooted in the region’s entangled ecologies, lived inheritances, and plural ways of knowing.

The World As It Is: Farming Between Collapse and Control

The dominant food system in South Asia and globally is cracking. Soil degradation, debt traps, disappearing biodiversity, and erratic weather have made farming precarious. Farmers are pushed to produce more with less, often under contracts, credit schemes, or policy nudges that strip them of autonomy.

Governments, meanwhile, are pursuing two parallel moves: techno-solutionist fixes (like drones, climate-smart seeds, digital agriculture platforms) and top-down greening (like abrupt organic mandates or input bans). These responses often operate on annual policy cycles. Funding windows reset before ecosystems can respond. Pilot schemes fade before soil can regenerate. Time is not treated as relational or ecological, but as administrative, resettable, turned into profit, and linear. What happens when the temporal rhythm of governance is out of sync with the seasons it seeks to reform? Policies expire. Ecosystems don’t.

In Sri Lanka, the overnight ban on synthetic fertilisers in 2021, without training or input access, led to yield collapse, food insecurity, and farmer protests. In India, Andhra Pradesh’s natural farming program scaled quickly, but critics note its uneven caste, class, and gender participation, and the risk of state-led co-option. Across the region, policy shifts rarely address the core: power asymmetries in land, knowledge, and governance.

Agroecology as a practice, survives - but as a systemic shift, it remains marginal. Worse, it’s at risk of being subsumed into the very logics it resists: efficiency over care, yield over nourishment, extraction over regeneration.

South Asian Agroecology: Entanglement, Not Escape

Agroecology here is not an import. It’s already practiced in ways formal policy often ignores. Take the Nayakrishi movement in Bangladesh, the Deccan Development Society in India, or the Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek in Pakistan. These are not just techniques. They’re ways of living, learning, and organizing differently.

Seed banks run by women’s collectives. Intercropping guided by lunar calendars. Forest–field–kitchen circuits where knowledge is ecological, embodied, and shared. But even within agroecological movements, fault lines persist. Who counts as a farmer? Who owns the land? Who profits from organic certification or carbon credit schemes? When caste hierarchies dictate who tills and who owns, when women grow food but don’t inherit land, agroecology risks reproducing exclusion under a greener name.

This isn’t an argument against agroecology. It’s an insistence that we see it whole, in its entanglements with social justice, historical violence, and the politics of recognition.

Any future-oriented approach must acknowledge that these traditions persist within fraught systems and that transformation means redistribution, not just revival.

Systemic Gaps We Must Confront

Agroecology faces structural roadblocks not only in practice but in the design of our institutions and systems. Below are some of the most persistent and under-addressed gaps:

• Land and Tenure: Agroecology without secure tenure is a contradiction. Many small and tenant farmers, especially women and lower-caste cultivators, operate under informal or short-term leases. This discourages long-term investment in ecological care. In India, tenancy laws are fragmented and often hostile to sharecroppers. In Nepal, women cultivating ancestral land may still lack documentation. Land records must evolve to reflect shared, rotational, and custodial models. Without structural tenure reform, agroecology risks being available only to those who already hold land.

• Labour and Care: Agroecology is not input-light, it is a lot of kaam (કામ / काम / work). Composting, pest management, seed selection, and intercropping demand time and deep ecological knowledge, most of which resides with women. Yet this labour is rendered invisible in most policy and budget frameworks. Training schemes often bypass those who do the work. Without valuing this care, through time banks, cooperative planning, or kinship-linked land access, we reproduce extractive dynamics under a green banner.

• Transition Risk and Debt: Ecological transitions carry real risks: lower yields, market rejection, and community skepticism. These burdens are often borne by individual farmers, while benefits like carbon sequestration or biodiversity protection are socialised. In Sri Lanka and parts of India, rapid policy shifts toward “natural” farming without support mechanisms have triggered distress. Distributed risk-sharing frameworks such as food grain banks, climate-indexed insurance, and slow withdrawal of subsidies are essential to avoid punishing the very people driving change. Some of these risk-sharing mechanisms exist in nascent forms: community grain banks and early attempts at weather-indexed insurance. Still, they remain fragmented and often misaligned with diverse, smallholder agroecology realities.

• Climate and Subsidy Mismatch: Agroecology’s benefits unfold slowly in the form of healthier soil, resilient systems, and reduced dependency. Yet funding and subsidies remain skewed. India still spends more on chemical fertilisers than all ecological transitions combined - an impressive feat of rooting subsidies deeper than crops. Climate adaptation plans may name agroecology, but rarely allocate meaningful resources. We need repurposed subsidies, integrated climate-agriculture budgets, and landscape-level outcome metrics to make this shift possible.

• Knowledge Injustice: State systems privilege scalable, monetisable, and standardised knowledge. Agroecological knowledge is often intergenerational, spiritual, embodied, and relational. In Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, women’s farming practices are often dismissed as unscientific, even when they outperform “official” methods. Agroecology needs recognition not just as a method but as an epistemology. R&D must decentralise in the form of funding farmer-to-farmer exchanges, validating soil wisdom, and redefining evidence.

• Market and Supply Chain Exclusion: Agroecological produce doesn’t fit the logic of monoculture procurement. It’s diverse, seasonal, small-batch, often fails retail aesthetics, and rarely comes with a barcode. Without changes in procurement standards, aggregation hubs, or cooperative logistics, these goods struggle to reach stable markets. In public nutrition programs, agroecological producers are often excluded due to bureaucratic volume or certification requirements. To thrive, agroecology needs a market ecosystem designed for diversity, not uniformity.

• Consumer Detachment and Value Perception: Cities can’t just eat and forget. If urban food systems demand uniform, cheap, and year-round produce, they’ll keep fueling the extraction that agroecology resists. Agroecological food often costs more, not because it’s overpriced, but because transitioning for farmers comes with risks of uncertain yields, labour intensity, and the absence of economies of scale. This isn’t yet accessible to all because systems haven’t been made affordable. Still, those with the means can help shift what’s considered valuable. To stand with agroecology is to see price as a reflection of care, not a luxury. It means embracing the bitterness and the bumps in a karela (કારેલા / कारलं / bitter gourd), waiting for mangoes, and asking where the soil stands in the supply chain — not just what’s on the shelf.

• Data and Representation: Agroecological practices often remain invisible in official data systems. Their diversity, seasonality, and embeddedness in informal economies resist standard metrics. What isn’t counted: from women’s compost rituals to intercropping cycles, isn’t funded or protected. Agricultural dashboards rely on inputs like yield per hectare, not measures of resilience or regeneration. Without new data protocols that reflect local knowledge and polycultural indicators, agroecology will continue to be overlooked in resource flows and risk assessments.

• Intermediary Misalignment: Most agroecological transitions fall apart not at the policy level, but within the institutions tasked with delivery. Panchayats, extension services, FPOs, and NGOs often operate with industrial assumptions — promoting yield, market linkage, and compliance over care and diversity. Many are trained under Green Revolution paradigms and lack incentives to support non-linear practices. Without re-aligning these intermediaries through training, mandates, and community accountability, the best agroecological ideas risk being neutralised in implementation.

What Needs to Shift: From Practice to Futures Infrastructure

To scale agroecology is not to replicate a technique. It is to scaffold an entire system that honours ecological time, plural knowledge, and shared care. Agroecology needs to be seen as infrastructural, not peripheral:

• Institutional Ecosystems: Agroecology needs institutions that are relational, not extractive. Imagine seed commons governed by intergenerational councils, extension systems that facilitate exchange rather than push compliance, and small-scale processing hubs rooted in cooperatives, not corporations. These are infrastructures of accompaniment. Designed to support diversity, embed trust, and hold ecological knowledge across time.

• Financing for Stewardship: Agroecological care unfolds over years, not quarters. But finance rarely waits. To make space for this rhythm, we need regenerative bonds, risk-pooling models, and participatory budgeting frameworks that reward soil health, crop diversity, and long-term resilience. Capital must stop chasing yield and start attending to care.

• Legal Anchoring: Legal systems must recognise what land users already know: that care can’t be separated from legitimacy. This means embedding soil pacts into tenancy law, creating agroecological zones in land-use plans, and revising Panchayat Acts to include biodiversity governance. Where ownership is contested, stewardship must still count.

• Urban–Rural Contracts: Agroecology cannot survive if cities continue to outsource risk while importing food. We need food procurement systems reimagined as climate infrastructure: municipal kitchens linked to rural agroecology belts, joint boards planning with farmers, and public menus that reflect seasons, not supply chains.

• Cultural Infrastructure: No shift endures without belonging. Agroecology must be embedded not only in laws and budgets, but also in stories, rituals, curricula, and collective memory. Cultural infrastructures, from seed festivals to soil songs, make ecological practices feel possible and shared.

Sketches for the Future: A Prototypology of Cultivation Commons

The ideas below treat agroecology not as a sector but as a civic metabolism. None of these sketches are standalone. They’re messy by design. They are meant to be layered and overlapping. Perhaps, a design grammar of cultivation commons. Some will fail. Some will be co-opted. But if we are to cultivate otherwise, we need new infrastructural forms. Not as fixes, but as fields of permission. They assume:

• That land can be held in stewardship, not possession.

• That diversity is not just a trait of ecosystems, but of governance.

• That memory, rhythm, and refusal of whatnot must be carried forward are legitimate forms of knowledge.

Soil Sovereignty Pacts

Land isn’t always owned. But it’s always cared for. Across much of South Asia, those who restore degraded soil, composters, intercroppers, and tenant cultivators remain unrecorded. And yet, care is constant. It builds fertility, retains moisture, and stabilises carbon. The legal system sees none of it. This sketch asks: What if ecological care was treated as a rightful share rather than a favour? What if tenure wasn’t binary — owner or not — but layered, time-bound, and stewardship-linked?

Soil Sovereignty Pacts are village-level agreements that recognise long-term ecological care by tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and informal cultivators. These pacts, co-designed with local councils, set mutual terms for land use, soil indicators, and grievance redress. Over time, they shift the locus of legitimacy: from paperwork to practice.

Imagine in northern Karnataka, a group of tenant millet farmers co-develop three-year Soil Pacts with landowners. Earthworm counts and compost cycles are not tracked by agribusiness apps. They’re documented by a rotating Soil Commons Cell made up of women, students, and retired teachers. These logs are painted onto walls and entered into the village register. In year three, farmers with consistent soil care records become eligible for public procurement schemes. By year ten, the district considers recognising these records as provisional tenure under a new agroecological reform bill. But just as things shift, a few landlords begin gaming the system. Registering fake pacts to claim subsidies. The village council pauses the program to review. Legitimacy is delicate. Care must be recorded and protected.

Solidarity Procurement Contracts

Everyone loves to say, “Support small farmers.” Until procurement begins. Then come the forms, the volume requirements, the delivery deadlines. Systems that reward uniformity and predictability often punish the very diversity agroecology protects.

This sketch proposes a different contract logic. One that recognises seasonality, favours biodiversity, and builds flexibility into risk. Solidarity Procurement Contracts are public or civic purchase agreements between institutions and agroecological producer groups. These contracts reward crop diversity, allow for adaptive sourcing based on climate shocks, and shift value away from volume toward resilience.

Imagine in Odisha, Adivasi farmers’ collectives enter annual procurement partnerships with school kitchens and public canteens. Instead of fixed quotas, contracts include clauses for substitution and seasonal variation. Menus shift with the harvest, millet one month, leafy greens the next. District nutrition officers, farmer unions, and kitchen coordinators meet each quarter to revise procurement plans. Payments arrive before sowing. By year seven, crop diversity becomes a formal indicator in state procurement audits. But by year nine, new officials push for standardisation, citing cost-efficiency. Some kitchens revert to large vendors. Others resist. The contract is still there, but its politics and the underlying intent must be defended.

Stewardship Fellowships

Agroecology’s knowledge isn’t dying. It’s being drowned out. What was once passed through soil, feel, and seed rituals now compete with migration, debt, and digital detachment. This sketch doesn’t romanticise return. It asks what kind of infrastructure would make staying worthwhile.

Stewardship Fellowships offer paid, rooted roles for rural youth. They are designed not around curricula, but around companionship with seed keepers, compost elders, forest monitors, and oral historians. It’s less about training and more about embedding: the right to linger, to listen, to tend.

Imagine in Nepal’s mid-hills, young fellows are nominated by elders. Each is given a modest stipend and paired with three mentors: a forest woman, a school teacher, and a retired rice grower. Over the years, they record water rituals, reintroduce lost pulses in kitchen plots, and host seasonal story gatherings. Their journals look like part soil record, part memory map, and feed into the district’s agroecology council. By year five, the program is recognised as an official civic fellowship. By year ten, it has seeded community land trusts governed by alumni. But in one village, a new fellow treats the work as a research gig, extractive and hurried. The elders withdraw. The fellowship rests for a season.

Rotational Commons Boards

Ecosystems are rotational. But most governance is static. Water committees, forest guards, and grazing permits rarely shift with seasons or ecological roles. This sketch proposes a re-patterning: what if institutions moved like the land they manage?

Rotational Commons Boards are made up not of fixed titles but of ecological stewards: fishers, foragers, composters, herders. Leadership rotates by season. Thresholds are set by rain, ritual, and plant cycles, and not calendar dates alone. And commons use is governed by function, not ownership.

Imagine in Sindh’s arid belt, a three-season board rotates among camel herders, herbalists, and water gatherers. From March to June, camel herders set grazing thresholds based on salt bush health and bird migrations. During the rains, foragers take charge. A seasonal ledger, co-maintained by schoolchildren, tracks usage, disputes, and rest periods. Over time, this ledger is used to inform district grazing policy. But after a failed monsoon, panic sets in. Some board members propose early access. Others resist. A rupture. The board pauses, renegotiates, and returns with a shorter rotation cycle. Adaptation is institutionalised.

Restorative Ecologies Tribunals

Not all loss is illegal. A stream dries up. A seed line fails. A fungus vanishes. There is no official complaint to file. But for agroecological communities, these losses are felt in memory, in ritual, in hunger.

Restorative Ecologies Tribunals are community-anchored forums to make ecological disruption visible. Not necessarily to assign blame, but to generate a response. They mix data with testimony and observation with ritual. Their outcomes are not fines, but repair plans: replanting, rotational bans, water rituals, memory walks.

Imagine a nadi (नदी / નદી / river) that once fed three bastis (બસ્તી / वस्ती / settlements) runs dry in Bhopal. A tribunal is called and convened by the panchayat but shaped by the community. Elders recall when the stream’s flow changed. Children perform stories of vanished frogs. Satellite maps show a deforested upstream ridge. The outcome: a 10-year rewilding and ritual corridor, backed by both district funds and ancestral kin groups. By year eight, water returns faintly. The tribunal calls it a beginning, not a fix.

Commons Stewardship Credit

What if value wasn’t measured in volume, but in restoration? This sketch proposes a cooperative financial layer rooted in ecological labour. Commons Stewardship Credit is a locally managed recognition system where care log entries, such as compost counts and seed journals, accumulate into credit eligibility.

Unlike debt, these credits aren’t tied to extraction. They are slow, relational, backed by cooperative trusts, and stubbornly immune to quarterly reporting cycles. Instead of collateral, they are secured by history, the soil logs, the fellowships, and the harvest ledgers demonstrating commitment.

Imagine in Tamil Nadu, a federation of seed-saving women uses soil restoration logs to access low-interest loans from a district-level agroecology cooperative. Repayment is not monthly but seasonal. If care thresholds, such as biodiversity indicators, soil health markers, are met, repayment is partially waived. A fellowship graduate audits the records. In year five, the district includes these credits in its climate adaptation metrics. In year eight, they are challenged by a banking lobby for being “non-compliant.” The community responds by publishing a Soil Ledger Archive. Credit, they argue, is not risk. It is sustained memory.

Over Time, They Intertwine

None of these sketches will live alone. Over time, their thresholds overlap: a pact shaped by tribunal memory; a procurement form revised with fellowship data; a commons board restructured by seasonal repair logs. These are not designs for replication. They are beginnings for recursion.

Governance doesn’t shift through decree. It shifts through the repetition of care.

From Care to Claim

None of these sketches are new. They are made of things we already know how to do: seed saving, seasonal calendars, public meals, and land memory. What’s missing is not knowledge, but the institutional courage to act on that knowledge differently.

This is not a call for scaling. It’s a call for scaffolding: pacts, ledgers, fellowships, and boards that support the slow work of growing food without extraction, memory without erasure, and governance without command. We don’t need more glossy pilot projects. We need the slow, unphotogenic accretion of trust and long-term permission to tend otherwise.

If you’re already working on these questions relating to tending land, rethinking procurement, and building rituals of repair, we’d love to learn from you.

Mini Glossary

• Soil Sovereignty Pact: A time-bound agreement between landowners and cultivators that ties land tenure to ecological care rather than just ownership.

• Solidarity Procurement Contract: A flexible, seasonal public purchasing agreement that values diversity and resilience over uniformity and yield.

• Stewardship Fellowship: A paid, intergenerational learning role for rural youth to apprentice with elders and tend local ecologies.

• Rotational Commons Board: A seasonal, shared governance structure where different ecological actors (herders, foragers, fishers) take turns leading decision-making.

• Restorative Ecologies Tribunal: A community assembly that responds to ecological loss, not to assign blame, but to generate communal acts of repair.

• Commons Stewardship Credit: A cooperative, memory-backed credit system that rewards ecological labour and care through eligibility, not debt.

Dhaval Kothari is a design researcher, strategist, and co-founder of Lagori Collective. Lagori is an interdisciplinary research and design lab in South Asia that advances futures thinking and participatory innovation through collaborative projects, community programming, and strategic foresight. Dhaval applies futures thinking to address broader social issues, while retooling systems to better anticipate and prepare for emerging challenges. He is particularly focused on building a South Asian lens for futures and foresight work.

Notes From In Between is a record of our in-progress thinking, provocations, open questions, and ongoing experiments at Lagori’s Social Design Lab. It’s where we make our process public, not to present answers, but to invite conversation. Check out our two Notes From In Between - Mausam and Jivrut.