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L.N. Revathy

COIMBATORE, Sept. 27

THE Kerala-based National Farmers' Protection Committee has launched a new movement namely `Community Enterprise Model' that could help build self-contained socio economic systems ensuring food security in the country.

The Community Enterprise Forum — promoted by the farmers' lobby comprising agricultural economists and Gandhian workers — has conducted national level workshops at Palakkad in Kerala and Thottiankulam and Kariapatti villages in Virudhunagar District in Tamil Nadu to propagate and gain support for this concept.

Mr K. Ravikumar, Chairman of the committee, who is spearheading the movement says the pathetic situation of over 200 million people starving even while FCI godowns were overflowing with food grains had to be stopped first, before ``we think of exporting our food grains to other countries''.

Pleading for an alternative system, the forum says, the primary objective should be to ensure food security to people and this would be possible only when people are involved in production. ``A technology-led production process as what the agri-business system proposes can never be a mass-based one because it restricts the access of the average farmer to advanced technologies and market for want of sufficient resources. The ideal alternative would be the Gandhian approach to farming development with community participation in planning and execution.''

The fundamental approach should be to build self-contained socio economic systems ensuring reasonable livelihood to every one, it added.

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