Bhutan, a tiny country in the Himalaya, has made a constitutional decision that the pursuit of happiness for the Bhutanese people will be the guiding principle of their economic policy, not the pursuit of economic growth as measured in the gross national product or gross domestic product.

Gross national happiness (GNH) was first coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuk.
GNH rests on four pillars:
l Promotion of sustainable development.
l Preservation and promotion of cultural values.
l Conservation of the natural environment.
l Establishment of good governance.

The GNH concept was developed in an attempt to define an indicator that measures quality of life and social progress in more holistic terms than the GDP. The GDP is an inaccurate measure of the state of the economy and society because it only measures commercial transactions and externalises social and ecological costs.
The GDP destroys self-reliance, creates debt and dependency on costly imports. Chemical agriculture is to agriculture what GDP is to the economy. It is based on false measures of productivity and high cost external inputs, which trap farmers in debt. The debt trap is what had pushed 200,000 farmers to commit suicide since 1997.
Chemical agriculture, like GDP, externalises the costs of disruption of ecological processes and the disintegration of society. Since agriculture is a biological process, it needs to maintain nature’s capital for sustainable production. The destruction of soil fertility, biodiversity and water resources lead to undermining agricultural productivity. Punjab — the land where the Green Revolution model was first applied — has lessons to teach us about the non-sustainability of chemical farming. Punjab’s soil is diseased and dying, its ground water is disappearing and its biodiversity has been wiped out. Its farmers are committing suicide. In the 1980s they took to extremism. I have told the story of the ecological and social decay in Punjab in my book The Violence of the Green Revolution.
Financial, ecological non-sustainability of production in chemical agriculture is based on:
l Costly seeds that are non renewable cannot be saved and re-grown by farmers and hence, add an entirely new financial burden on the peasantry. These seeds are also untested and unreliable and have been brought to the market through self-certification.
l Costly chemicals, which drain the peasant’s scarce capital and leaves agro ecosystems more fragile and impoverished, thereby increasing the vulnerability of farming.
l Monocultures of cash crops, which further aggravate the risks of crop failure due to pests, diseases and climate change and decreased nutrition per acre.

While farmers are dying due to debt and negative incomes the poor are being denied their right to food. Thirty per cent of the rural households in India were eating 1,600 kcal in 1998 as compared to 1,820 kcal in 1989. In 1999-2000 almost 77 per cent of the rural population consumed less than the poverty line calorie requirement of 2,400 kcal. Today, one-third of all hungry children in the world are in India.
Meantime, urban children are victims of food-related diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Globally one billion suffer from malnutrition and two billion are victims of malnutrition related to junk food and nutritionally-empty calories that the industrialised food system is producing.
In spite of the failure of the chemical-industrial model, the myth of the Green Revolution continues. The Time Magazine of September 6, 2010, in its cover story on the real cost of organic food, states “Norman Borlaug, the so-called father of the green revolution, who nearly doubled wheat yields in Pakistan and India in the ’60s via a combination of high yield plants and fertiliser use, is often credited with saving one billion lives”.
This account is false on many counts. Firstly, the so-called “high-yielding varieties” are, in fact, “high response varieties”, engineered to withstand high doses of chemicals. Secondly, the increase in wheat production, which is assigned to chemicals and chemically-adapted seeds, can be accounted for any increase in land under wheat cultivation and increase in water provided for irrigation. Thirdly, high cost external input agriculture is the reason for hunger. It has not saved a billion lives.
Biodiverse organic farming practised and promoted by Navdanya addresses both dimensions of the human crisis related to food. As the Navdanya report “Biodiversity Based Organic Farming: A New Paradigm for Food Security and Food Safety”, shows biodiverse organic farming produces more food, of better nutrition quality and higher incomes for farmers. It can put an end to both farmers’ suicides and starvation. It is the road to growing happiness.
The GNH as a holistic measure is a much more accurate indicator of the state of society, nature and economy than the GDP.
Organic farming has become a human and ecological imperative in our times. There is not one but many reasons why we must go organic. Farmers’ suicides and climate chaos are a wake-up call for a new paradigm for food and farming.
Organic farming is to agriculture what GNH is to society. Both maximise welfare of humans and other beings. Organic agriculture is living GNH, as the Prime Minister of Bhutan had stated. It promotes all four pillars of GNH. Organic agriculture promotes sustainable development.
Organic farming can be a significant contributor to GNH for Bhutan and for every country. We need an organic India as much as we need an organic Bhutan.
The Government of Bhutan has invited me to help make Bhutan go organic. As the Prime Minister of Bhutan has said: “Our goal is that Bhutan will be the first sovereign nation in the world to be fully 100 per cent organic in its food production, with the ‘grown in Bhutan’ label synonymous with ‘organically grown’. Going organic is living GNH. Going organic is not only fulfilling an explicit promise this government made in 2008 and affirmed again in my recent state of the nation address. It is also a key to putting GNH fully into practice and action in this country. I am most grateful to Dr Vandana Shiva for coming here to help us take ‘organic’ from the fringe to the mainstream in the Kingdom of Bhutan”.

Dr Vandana Shiva is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust