Indian climate guru calls for action at Cop29 to help world's small farmers

Sadhguru to highlight urgent need to support shift to sustainable farming and efforts to boost soil health

Sadhguru, left, says marginalised farmers need support before climate change sparks a mass migration from villages to cities. Photo: Save Soil

An Indian climate guru will urge leaders at Cop29 to allocate billions in climate finance for small farmers, so they can learn vital techniques to protect the soil and regenerate farm land to help tackle the climate crisis.

Thousands of people representing governments around the world, companies, and environmental and human rights groups will gather in Azerbaijan from November 11 to discuss the threat of climate change.

Jaggi Vasudev, popularly known as Sadhguru, has a key message for the UN environmental summit in Baku, that more climate finance must be invested towards small farmers so they can focus on improving soil health, restoring biodiversity, boosting food security and generating profits.

The 67-year-old yogi warns the voices of marginalised farmers must be heard or the devastating impact of climate change will spark the mass displacement of millions from villages to cities.

“Right now, these hundreds of millions of farmers can only access 0.8 per cent of total climate finance [$660.2 billion]. If these farmers are not financially supported to transition to sustainable practices, there are going to be global challenges with food security,” Sadhguru told The National in an interview before the start of Cop 29 on Monday.

“The world is also not ready to take the burden of the mass migration this will cause from rural to urban areas. It is essential that small and marginal farmers are encouraged, supported and incentivised to take care of their land sustainably and to have a profitable livelihood. There is a risk of significant social unrest if we do not take action.”

The vast gap with only a tiny fraction of global finance going to smallholder farmers is reflected in UN Food and Agriculture Organisation studies.

Smallholder farmers typically have farmlands of five hectares or less. They account for 84 per cent of farms globally and produce one-third of the world's food while facing the brunt of droughts, wildfires and floods.

Make soil part of main agenda

Sadhguru, along with more than 70 non-government organisations, will hand over a policy document at Cop29 calling on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for financial assistance to smallholder farmers, so that it is economically viable for them to make environmentally friendly changes.

“This is intended to influence policymakers of all parties [at Cop29] to make soil a part of the main agenda and make climate finance easily accessible to farmers,” he said.

“Cop29 has the opportunity to acknowledge agriculture as both a mitigation and adaptation strategy for climate change. According to our research, agriculture soils conservatively have the potential to sequester 27 per cent of carbon that is needed to arrest the global temperature rise by two degrees.”

Rotating crops, spraying fewer chemicals and planting trees to rejuvenate degraded land can turn fields into vast sponges to absorb carbon dioxide.

Sadhguru leads the Save Soil movement and works with farming communities to enrich the soil with traditional techniques using animal waste, vegetation to allow microbes to thrive, ensure water retention and reduce soil erosion.

His message is that conventional farming, with its reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides, has caused the land to degrade. Sadhguru draws thousands of people to his meditation and yoga programmes. He has more than a billion views on YouTube and 12 million followers on Instagram who listen to him speak on climate action, environment, spirituality and health.

Change on the ground

The Save Soil network works with hundreds of thousands of farmers in India to help bring about change on the ground. Sadhguru spoke of an initiative that encouraged farmers to plant trees alongside conventional crops. This has proved profitable, while re-establishing the ecological balance on farmlands and preventing soil erosion.

Farmers in south India command a higher price for turmeric after planting trees in the same field and using animal waste as fertiliser. This process boosts the amount of curcumin, a component of turmeric that manages inflammatory conditions and arthritis.

“As a part of our on-ground projects, over the last 18 years we have 225,000 farmers converted to tree-based agriculture, whose incomes have gone up phenomenally. The nutritional value in the land has gone up and the water tables have come up,” Sadhguru said.

“Turmeric farmers who are doing it with tree-based agriculture, their crop yields have gone up. Not only that, their neighbours are selling turmeric in the same season at 7,000 rupees per quintal [$82 per 100 kilogram], but the tree-based agriculture farmers are selling it at 12,500 rupees [$150] per quintal simply because the curcumin value is much, much higher - simply because of the leaf and the organic material in the soil.”

'Understand what is happening to us'

Farmers hope the world will listen when Sadhguru and others speak in Baku, as the survival of small farmers around the world depends on them obtaining funds to boost the nutritional value of the food we eat.

“If world leaders listen and understand what is happening to us, it will make a difference," said Sachithanandam, 55, from India’s southern Tamil Nadu state. “Small farmers have no back-up when there is drought or floods, we face disasters every year.”

He has benefitted from growing more than 1,000 coconut, mango, banana and timbre trees in his rice fields, using cow manure and urine instead of chemical fertilisers.

“People must know that if you kill the soil, you are killing the health of future generations,” he said. “Chemical fertilisers kill micro-organisms, organic farming and growing trees has helped because the soil needs microbes to give food to the plants. There are farmers from our village who want to change but it takes time and not everyone can manage.”

TM Manickaraj, 75, switched to natural farming in his farm in the suburbs of India’s southern Coimbatore city. He uses manure from cows, goats and chickens and has ditched pesticide for a green chilli, garlic and ginger spray.

He has planted coffee, cocoa and nutmeg with fruit trees such as mango, guava, lemon, orange and fig, and mahogany, rosewood, neem and teak trees.

“We don’t use even a single gram of chemicals for pest control or fertiliser,” he said. “But it has not been easy and I have struggled because it takes time to go natural. If a farmer gets support, then a lot can be done.”

Stand up and deliver

Experts are hoping Cop29 will deliver finance for vulnerable groups.

Sadhguru also called for "a concrete deadline to restore agriculture soils, that all parties sign up to”.

Food systems found a place in the Cop28 UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action last year, when 159 countries committed to climate-positive action towards soil and agriculture.

The spotlight in Baku will be on increasing financial commitments to developing nations.

Simon Stiell, the UN Climate Change executive secretary, has called for Cop29 to be “the stand-and-deliver Cop” recognising that climate finance could save billions of lives and livelihoods from the effects of climate change.