In the early 1980s, India was still reeling from the Bhopal gas tragedy when a young agriculture officer in Palakkad, Kerala, found her compass in a slim book from Japan.

The One-Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto against chemical farming, was more than a book for Usha Soolapani. It was a turning point.

“It became a guiding light,” she recalls. “It encouraged me to begin farming without chemicals and to root agriculture in philosophy rather than mere production.”

That philosophy would shape her life’s work: conserving India’s folk rice varieties and building a movement that has helped revive paddy traditions across six states.

Today, in Thiruvananthapuram, Usha’s life and work are closely intertwined with her friend and partner Jayakumar. Both are associated with Thanal, a collective that feels less like an organisation and more like a sprawling family.

Within its circle of friends and supporters is a shared commitment to environmental health and justice.

From Palakkad’s wetlands to India’s rice heartlands

For nearly two decades, Usha worked quietly, witnessing the slow unravelling of Kerala’s paddy ecosystem.

Farmers who once earned more than government employees were now struggling with rising cultivation costs and stagnant grain prices.

Wetlands disappeared under real estate development. Paddy fields changed hands, and with them, centuries of ecological balance began to disappear.

Her campaign against chemical pesticides, particularly Endosulfan, became a decisive turning point in her life.

Endosulfan had been aerially sprayed on cashew plantations in Kerala’s Kasaragod district between 1978 and 2000. Communities living near the plantations reported birth defects, disabilities and a range of health problems, eventually making Kasaragod one of India’s most prominent pesticide-contamination cases.

The campaign against Endosulfan grew into a long-running fight for recognition and compensation. The pesticide was eventually banned in Kerala, while the Supreme Court later intervened over the welfare of those affected. In January 2017, the court directed the Kerala government to disburse Rs 500 crore in compensation to more than 5,000 victims.

The issue also gained international significance. In 2011, the Stockholm Convention listed technical Endosulfan and its related isomers under Annex A as a persistent organic pollutant, with specific exemptions and provisions for phasing out its production and use.

For Usha, witnessing the consequences of chemical-intensive agriculture brought home the connection between farming, public health and the environment.

“What I witnessed in Palakkad was no isolated instance,” says Usha, who has since become a leading voice in India’s food sovereignty and agroecology movements.

“The same story echoed across India’s rice heartlands.”

That realisation took Usha and her colleagues at Thanal, one of Kerala’s oldest environmental NGOs, across the country between 2005 and 2018.

They travelled from Tamil Nadu’s lush deltas to Karnataka’s rust-red interiors, West Bengal’s floodplains and the tribal highlands of Chhattisgarh.

In each place, they sought out farmers who were still safeguarding ancestral seeds, often storing them in clay pots or tucking them away in the rafters of their kitchens.

What they found was more than grain. It was memory.

At seed festivals, the air carried the fragrance of freshly cooked rice while elders shared stories of varieties that had nearly disappeared.

Each gathering became an opportunity to revive that heritage — one seed and one story at a time.

From a campaign to a regional movement

The work was part of a much greater effort.

The Save Our Rice Campaign (SOR) was launched regionally by Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PANAP) in 2003 to counter threats to Asia’s rice heritage, food sovereignty and traditional farming knowledge. In India, Thanal became one of the key organisations associated with the campaign, helping build a grassroots movement around indigenous rice varieties and ecological farming.

Over the years, the campaign grew beyond seed conservation. It brought together farmers, environmental groups and community organisations around questions of food security, control over seeds and the future of farming.

More than two decades on, the wider Save Our Rice network continues to work across Asia, with campaigns and partner organisations spanning........

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