Nepal's Women Farmers Discard Imported Hybrid Seeds and Husband Local Varieties in Co-Op Seed Banks

By Sudeshna Sarkar
Kathmandu - Learning a lesson from crop failures attributed to climate change, Nepal's women farmers are discarding imported hybrid seeds and husbanding hardier local varieties in cooperative seed banks.

"I had a crop failure two years ago," says Shobha Devkota, 32, from Jibjibe village in Rasuwa, a hilly district in central Nepal which is part of the Langtang National Park, a protected area encompassing two more districts, Nuwakot and Sindhupalchowk.

"The maize was attacked by pests, the paddy had no grain and the soil grew hard. I had a tough time trying to feed my three daughters and sending them to school."

Since her marriage 17 years ago, Shobha had been sharing farming chores with her husband Ram Krishna. However, when he left for Dubai four years ago to work as a security guard, farming became her responsibility entirely.

Though she has never been to school and can only scrawl her name, Shobha and other women in the village who share similar backgrounds, are keenly aware of changing climate and its adverse impact on livelihoods.

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Co-op Grocers to Stop Organic Cosmetics Fraud

Thank you to the thousands of Organic Consumers Association members who have been participating in our Coming Clean campaign to get organic retailers to clean up their health & beauty care aisles. We've been trying to clean the shelves of cosmetics and personal care products that claim to be organic but aren't certified to USDA standards. Many of these mislabeled organic body care products (including popular brands such as Avalon, Nature's Gate, Jason's, and Giovanni's) contain few (or in some cases no) organic ingredients and are routinely laced with petroleum-based and problematic chemical ingredients.

This week, after receiving 6,000 letters from OCA members, the National Cooperative Grocers Association alerted their 134 retail coops that, as of June 2011, they expect all "organic" claims on body care products to comply with USDA National Organic Program standards for products that are "USDA Organic" and "Made With Organic Ingredients," and NSF/ANSI 305 standards for products that "Contain Organic Ingredients."

NCGA's organic cosmetics integrity policy is essentially the same as the one announced by Whole Foods Market earlier this summer.

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