Hands versus chemicals The story of weed control in Kerala. It was not an easy task for Lakshmikutty Amma, a seventy year old woman belonging to a former landlord family of South Kerala. That day she also worked in her own paddy field, (with two feed mud) along with the two women labourers, to complete the deweeding work. She could not get enough labourers on that day. Moreover, she felt that their wages are "very high". It was for the first time in her life that she did this work. Even the unemployed young women of her caste would not venture into this task. Thus she was very tired when we met afterwards, telling me that the "new circumstances" forced her to do this work. However, her eyes emitted the rays of satisfaction in showing that she cannot be mauled by these "circumstances". This incident depicts the story of weed control in Kerala. Hand weeding once or twice, depending on the weed growth, was the traditional practice in the paddy fields of the rain-fed valleys of this wet-tropical region. In addition, farmers would keep the fields under submergence by blocking the flow of rain water, to control the growth of weeds. Whenever there were dry spells during the monsoon period, there would be lush growth of weeds in these fields. In Kerala, farmers feared these dry spells not due to the non-availability of moisture, but because of the abundant weed growth. Hand weeding in these fields with one of three feet of clayey mud is really a tedious task. Traditionally this was done by the women labour belonging to the so called lower castes. Members of the farm family (especially women members) rarely stepped into these fields. Wages rise In the current situation, farmers face labour shortage during peak seasons when everybody needs labour. The younger generation in these labour groups are now more inclined to take up less tedious or better paying jobs in households, construction work, cashew processing, or in small industries or trade centres. A good number of them are sufficiently educated to take up jobs in government services or migrate to bigger cities. The cost of agricultural labour has also gone up significantly in Kerala. The wage is around Rs. 60 (US$ 2), which is almost two times higher than that in other parts of South India and almost three times higher than wages in North India. The increase in labour costs in construction jobs as a fallout of the migration of Keralaites to middle-east countries also resulted in the increase of agricultural wages. Other changes have also taken place, like the disappearance of attached labour, whereby a labour family would be attached to a farm family. The farm family used to be obliged to take care of the needs of the labour family, even during the off-work season. This ensured the availability of labour during peak seasons. These inevitable (socially necessary) changes which resulted in the high cost and the scarcity of labour would be considered by any technologist or agricultural planner as an ideal ground for the introduction of labour-saving and effort-reducing technologies. The use of weedicides in many parts of the world was promoted by these sorts of changes. In Kerala, macro-level statistics says that the use of pesticides in general and that of herbicides in particular is very low except in a few pockets. This is so because the cultivation of paddy in many areas of Kerala (other than those pockets where it is a commercial practice) is primarily for home consumption. The average size of land-holding was small in this state. It was further reduced during the last few decades due to the splitting of families and due to the implementation of land reforms. These small pieces of land are cultivated for domestic consumption and the farmers are generally reluctant to use chemical pesticides or weedicides in these fields. Theoretical effectiveness A series of experiments conducted by the Kerala Agricultural University (KAU) say something on the success of chemical weedicides in the state. As inadequacies of the farmer's field will not reflect in the experimental results, they indicate the theoretical effectiveness of the weedicides. A few interesting conclusions came out while analysing the results. The researchers compared efficiency (in terms of yield rate) of different chemical measures with the traditional practice of hand-weeding. Out of the seventeen experiments conducted during a period of 12 years from 1979 to 1991, four showed that hand-weeding is superior to chemicals. Nine experiments led to the conclusion that hand-weeding is on par with the best chemical measure adopted. The rest of the experiments brought out the superiority of one or other chemical weedicide. Considering the fact that the viable alternative to hand-weeding is not a single chemical (but one chemical in an experiment and another chemical in another experiment), and the fact that nearly three-fourth of the experiments put hand-weeding also at the top in terms of yield rate, one can justifiably say that hand-weeding is superior to chemicals in terms of yield rate. Costs compared Thus weedicides can not be considered in Kerala as a superior practice in terms of yield rate. The decision to use weedicides or hand-weeding would be based on the cost. There are not many experiments which compared the cost of weedicides with that of hand-weeding. One significant series of experiments was conducted in Pattambi research station, which has been doing pioneering research work on paddy for the last six to seven decades. The agro-climate character of this region is similar to that of the largest paddy-growing area in Kerala. This series was conducted during mid-eighties. However, agricultural wages had increased drastically even by that time (because of the gulf-boom in late seventies). The results essentially shows that hand-weeding is economically as good as, if not better than, the application of commonly used chemicals. Thus the dilemma faced by the farmers of Kerala is this: they prefer to avoid weedicides in farms producing paddy for self-consumption. Moreover, as shown by the experiments, these chemical measures are not attractive in terms of either the yield rate or the cost of weed control. However, the scarcity of labour and the increase in wage rates make hand-weeding expensive. Weedicides and gender The perception of the farmers that wage rates are "very high" is not shared by agricultural labourers. Madhavi, who has been working as an agricultural labourer in the same village where Lakshmikutty lives, elaborates on this "wrong perception". "The paddy cultivation is a seasonal activity and it may not give us more than 60 to 70 working days in a year. The cost of every other commodity has gone up and the wage for deweeding is less than that for construction work", Madhavi says. When asked about the possibility of using weedicides as a means to reduce the difficulty of their work, she told me that the application of weedicides would become a man's work and that would reduce the working days for women. Thus weed control raises economic, social, technical and gender issues in Kerala. This is also connected to the overall problems of paddy cultivation in the state. The shift over to chemical inputs and high yielding varieties has not increased yield rates significantly due to the aero-climatic factors. Farmers have to continue with the traditional inputs and methods like organic manure and hand-weeding even to keep up the same yield rates. However, the cost of these traditional inputs have increased significantly while the price of rice stayed behind. This puts the paddy-growing farmers into a precarious situation. The struggle of Laksmikutty Amma is not at all unique in Kerala. V. Santhakumar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology, Madras 600 036, India. ILEIA Newsletter Vol. 11 No. 3 p. 25 << country/story review