It’s nothing less than an agroecological revolution. And it’s led by women in the Global South, who are creating their own alternatives to toxic dependencies. Natasha Foote sits down with Swati Renduchintala, a researcher with farmer empowerment organisation Rythu Sadhikara Samstha, to understand how Andhra Pradesh’s Natural Farming movement has changed the lives of millions of Indian smallholders, and shows no signs of stopping.
An interview with Swati Renduchintala, by Natasha Foote.
Ecologists call them pioneer species – those tough plants that take root in unlikely places, making a home in bare ground to stabilise soils and slowly rebuild life. These plants (literally) lay the groundwork for other species to follow. Through a process known as succession, these early arrivals create the conditions for increasingly complex ecosystems to emerge.
That’s the image that jumps to mind when speaking with Swati Renduchintala, one of the powerhouses behind Andhra Pradesh’s pioneering Natural Farming training programme.
It might have been hard to envisage that a small pilot initiative started in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in 2004 and led by a handful of women would grow into one of the world’s largest agroecological transitions.
But that is precisely what happened.
Like pioneer plants, these women have laid down the conditions for change in their communities. Today, more than 10,000 farmer trainers are helping others adopt natural farming methods that produce nutritious food, reduce dependence on costly chemical inputs and improve farm incomes.
Now, this women-led movement has taken root and spread across the landscape, transforming how farming knowledge is shared and practised. That is how the programme, which recently won the coveted 2026 Food Planet Prize, has gone from strength to strength, now reaching some 1.8 million Indian farmers.
And the movement has no intention of stopping at India’s borders.
Act local, think global
Like ecological succession itself, the process is uneven, adaptive and shaped by local conditions. But the emergence of new shoots across continents raises a larger possibility: that Andhra Pradesh is not an isolated success story, but an early pioneer paving a path for a wider transition.
And this transition is well underway, according to Swati. From Zambia and Sri Lanka to Brazil and Cambodia, farmers, community organisations and governments are beginning to explore whether the lessons learned in India can take root in different soils.
In Zambia, the concern is food security. In Sri Lanka, it is rebuilding trust in alternatives after the country’s failed fertiliser ban. But beneath these differences lies a common question: how can farming become less dependent on increasingly fragile global supply chains for fertilisers, pesticides and seeds?
But Swati sees more shared ground than differences, pointing out that soil microbial systems are a “universal phenomenon”. “Usually when people hear about agroecology, or they hear about chemical-free farming, if it is only a story of Andhra Pradesh, which is a great story, it’s like, ‘oh, but it’s context specific, it’s happening in one part of the world’. Many people say, ‘it works for them, it may not work for us’. But that simply is not true,” she said.
This extends to Europe too. “We’ve met a lot of farmers in Europe who have this blockage. ‘Oh, but it happens in the Global South, because they have small landholdings’. So the idea that it’s very geographic specific remains. But it’s simply not true,” she said.
Ask for forgiveness, not permission
Pioneer species do not wait for perfect conditions – they create them. “We cannot wait for any donors of the world to wake up someday and say, oh my god, Andhra Pradesh, India, it’s happening, let’s start elsewhere,” Swati says. As such, the decision was taken to reinvest prize money into pilot projects elsewhere, such as in Zambia.
The spread of natural farming does not follow the well-trodden path of agricultural innovation, where technologies move from university meeting rooms to laboratories and multinational companies into farmers’ fields. Instead, knowledge travels through farmer networks, grassroots organisations and local institutions.
While the story of knowledge transfer never follows the same playbook, it often has many of the same ingredients – namely, that success requires pioneer shoots of energy rooted locally on the ground, in the shape of a strong implementing partner. “It’s a demand-driven process,” Swati stresses. “They’re like, we want to do it. It’s not top to bottom”.
In this way, there is “no dependency on Andhra Pradesh”. “The idea for us to support other countries is we want to share our knowledge. It is free for the public. This knowledge system should be available to and accessible to all farmers across the globe,” she said.
In Zambia, this looks like two faith-based organisations across two locations; one in the Zambian capital of Lusaka, and another in the north of the country. Thanks to their linkages with Zambia’s agricultural training centre, they have managed to adapt the lessons learned from India to the local context, setting up 60 pilot projects in the country with the hope that this will soon grow via their own champion farmers.
Europe’s ‘dumping ground’
A lot of the impetus for change also has to do with Europe’s disregard for the places that help feed its supermarket shelves, and the fact that it soaks up so much of the value flowing out of countries like India, according to Swati.
“We import most of our fertilisers from countries in the Global North, which means a constant outflow of foreign exchange,” she explained. Despite the Indian government’s efforts to contain inflation, prices continue to soar. At the same time, the Indian rupee has “weakened significantly against the US dollar, making imported fertilisers even more expensive.”
She noted that because fertilisers are traded in dollars, India must spend increasing amounts of foreign currency to secure supplies. “We’re paying more for the same inputs, while also facing supply shortages,” she said. “With India’s foreign exchange reserves under pressure, continuing to rely on imported fertilisers is becoming increasingly difficult.”
But not everyone is feeling the current crisis in the same way. “What we realised in Andhra Pradesh, any external change in the fertiliser availability is not impacting the farmers who are doing natural farming,” she said. “Basically natural farming is making you soil-resilient, climate-resilient, but it is ‘external-factors resilient’ also”.
Meanwhile, Swati sees a common thread between the partner countries. “Whatever fertiliser or pesticide is banned in Europe, the Global South is a dumping ground,” she said, calling places like Sri Lanka a “ticking time bomb health wise”.
“The common narrative in India or Nepal or Cambodia is that fertilisers and pesticides are being pushed into the food systems. That was the commonality,” she said, calling it a “capturing” of food systems by multinational corporations and so-called ‘development’ agencies.
The goal, she explained, is to equip farming communities with the knowledge and confidence to make their own decisions, rather than becoming dependent on markets for external inputs.
“You talk to a farmer in Peru, you talk to a farmer in South Africa or Zambia, or in South-East Asia – we are divided by continents, but we are united by this agriculture and farm crisis,” she said.
Opportunity in the chaos
Swati does not underestimate the challenges ahead. She expects growing resistance from powerful interests with a stake in maintaining chemical-intensive agriculture. “The industry is going to lock horns,” she said, warning that competing narratives about what constitutes sustainable agriculture will “create confusion” as different actors seek to shape the future of food systems.
Yet she remains optimistic that change is possible, pointing to the recovery of the ozone layer as evidence that coordinated global action can work.
“When I was growing up, everyone was talking about the hole in the ozone layer,” she said. “Today, we hardly talk about it because countries came together, introduced policy changes, and acted collectively.”
Her hope is that the coming years will bring that same combination of political will, international cooperation and behavioural change to farming. “I’m confident we’ll see some groundbreaking policy shifts and changes in the way people think and farm,” she said.
“The next five years will be chaotic, confusing. But, if we really manoeuvre this opportunity properly, we will have a future where we talk about soil resilience. But only if it’s a collective effort,” she concluded.
Whether or not the world follows in Andhra Pradesh’s steps remains to be seen. But if ecological succession teaches us anything, it is that transformative change often begins with just a handful of pioneers willing to grow where few others think it possible.
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This article is produced in cooperation with the
Heinrich Böll Stiftung European Union.
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