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Glocal Development of Natural Farming Movement
The Natural Farming, a farming method under the principles of no-tillage, no-fertilizer, no-pesticides, and no-weeding, had been advocated by a late Japanese farmer and philosopher, Masanobu Fukuoka, since the 1950s. After the English translation of his book, One Straw Revolution, was published in 1978, the Natural Farming became widely known around the world, and the book has been translated into more than twenty-nine languages. After 1979, Fukuoka was invited to visit various parts of the world (in seventeen countries), and he was actively engaged in promoting his method. The Natural Farming has been regarded and accepted by many as a way of radical dissent to the conventional agriculture, and to the modern industrial civilization in general.
In India, One Straw Revolution has been translated into nine regional languages within India. Fukuoka was invited to India three times, and delivered lectures and gave instructions to farmers in various parts of India. Curiously enough, however, those translations and invitations were promoted separately by different individuals’ voluntary efforts, and, in many cases, the each process of those promotions seemed, in fact, as if just a cumulation of incidental episodes of accidental encounters and unintended consequences. In other words, there has been no concrete organization or network for the Natural Farming movement in India, although the movement itself has been arguably active.
It is also important to note the aspects of diversity and change in the movement. The Natural Farming method is not rigidly structured and has been “re-embedded” repeatedly and differently at each place. Even for Fukuoka himself, there was no end in his process of “re-embedding.”