By Dipti Adhikari
Dipti Adhikari, 21, is a third year agriculture student from the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Sciences of Tribhuwan University, Nepal. She lives in a sub-urban hub called Bharatpur, in the heart of Chitwan district. Chitwan has its roots embedded in agriculture and despite being a sub-urban area, people still have land holdings in which they grow their daily sustenance crops, from vegetables to monsoonal paddy farming.
Agriculture for me has and will be a very pivotal aspect in my life. Ever since I was a kid I have helped my mother in the fields from ploughing to sowing and harvesting. My family has always been involved in agriculture though in a sustenance basis only, as most of the families in the Terai region of Nepal are, basically paddy farmers like us. It has helped me to shape who I am as a person in the present. Helping my mother has helped me create bonds with her, and understand her in a better way, as my mother is a very busy person and I don’t get to spend as much time as I would like to with her. I am quite influenced by how my mother is always helping others; I have learnt a lot from her.
Being an agriculture student I have had tremendous opportunities come and gone my way. A person with my family’s background cannot possibly dream of going to foreign countries in order to attend a seminar, workshop or convention; money has always been lacking for endeavors as such. The average GDP of the whole population of Nepal is low and so are living standards. Only a handful of minority of Nepalese can afford to ever dream of a vacation or any other kind of luxury. I think the major problem for my generation is that they can see the opportunities just flying by them, due to the lack of necessary resources; it is said that ignorance is bliss and in our case it would have been so if not for the access to the Internet, where we can see and can only imagine what taking part in some major life changing and inspiring programmes would be like. Many of the agencies working in my country only garner international funding. Governmental and non-governmental agencies argue that we don’t have funds when asked to organize or attend any programmes. The Youth Ministry of Nepal, when asked for funds for certain endeavors simply state it as a wonderful opportunity; but they have a lack of funds to give out for programmes.
People in my country, Nepal, have been engaged in agriculture since the start of civilization in this land and they know much more than us students about the different ways and aspects of agriculture. As a young person working in this sector, one of the major problems I face is the lack of confidence shown by farmers. The ways and the techniques that we show them feel new to them and thus are put aside as rubbish or as too modern. People rely heavily on the chemical fertilizers that are always in a shortage in the country, but what they fail to understand and grasp is that a country with this vast of a reserve of natural resources cannot rely on chemical supplements but should rather double the amount of produce solely by the organic produce of the country. The Green Revolution left a mark in my country and now the already conservative farmers are reluctant to change their ways again; accepting chemical fertilizers in their farming endeavours alone was enough of a change for them.
In my opinion and experience the main hindrance as a young person working in the field of agriculture I face is the reluctance of rural farmers to adopt new and effective ideas. The best solution I see for this is to keep trying at a local scale; and not in places in the capital of the country where nobody practices land holding agriculture anymore. Implementing and showing the results in the farmer’s field itself be would be, in my opinion, the best way to overcome the prejudice embedded in the minds of rural farmers. As long as the responsible fraction of agriculture ministries for dissemination of new findings and practices of agriculture sector is poor, no good is ever going to come from research or formal classroom studies.
This belongs to a blog series profiling youth leadership in landscapes. Tell us your youth story – submit blogs to landscapes.youth@gmail.com
