Dr Debal Deb and THE LAST HARVEST | Saving indigenous rice from extinction in India

Описание: Without the diversity lost to corporate farming, rice is doomed to extinction. Journalist Dan Saladino meets Dr Debal Deb: the man saving thousands of endangered varieties, gifting future resilience to the food that half of humankind rely on.

When corporate farming swept Asia in the 1960s and 70s, genetically uniform rice replaced thousands of local grains. All it will take is one new disease, and without diversity, it is doomed to extinction.

Journalist Dan Saladino is a forager of endangered food stories in this fragile world. The film follows his encounter with Dr Debal Deb, who, over 30 years, has conserved 1,460 indigenous rice varieties from the most remote tribes of India. Each is meticulously cultivated on Basudha Farm in an ever-growing patchwork that maintains the genetic genotypes year on year. Every grain saved gifts us resilience: some withstand floods or high winds, seawater or drought, others have medicinal properties or twenty times the amount of iron promised by genetically modified ‘iron fortified’ strains. Every staggering idiosyncrasy is backed up by rigorous scientific testing in Debal’s Calcutta lab.

We owe this edible diversity to thousands of years of innovation by our ancestors. Today, Debal is putting his seed bank, unparalleled anywhere else in the world, back into the hands of those farmers so they can regain their own seeds and sovereignty. Named Vrīhi – Sanskrit for rice – he hopes “it will germinate in the minds of the people, as well as in the fields”. We all need to know Debal’s story. Like the rice he has saved, his ideas are too precious to be lost.

A film by Jason Taylor for The Gaia Foundation
Story by Debal Deb and Dan Saladino