LAHORE – Being a woman in the male-dominated field of farming in Pakistan is the least of Samiya Mumtaz's problems. This 25-year-old pioneer from Lahore says she faces more resistance as a shehri, a city dweller, "who supposedly does not know agriculture."
An even bigger problem, it seems, is the kind of 'agriculture' she proposes. For Ms Mumtaz is one of a small but growing breed of environmentally-conscious farmers who are seeking to undo the legacy of the so-called Green Revolution that took the country by storm in the 1970s.
The farmers who have gone organic believe that reliance on fertilisers and pesticides is short-sighted. They are extremely critical of the government's campaign to convince farmers to let go of their traditional practices, as it can only ruin productivity in the long run. They have even let go of their practice of dividing land into two portions: one with high-cost chemical inputs for the market, the other chemical-free, for home consumption.
Artificial methods and fast-growing hybrids threaten to obliterate indigenous crop varieties. It took Ms Mumtaz two years to locate a farmer who still used deli (indigenous) wheat. Not exactly a discovery one would expect to electrify a young, female, upper- middle class city-dweller—but then, Ms Mumtaz has unusual pursuits. She plans to grow the indigenous wheat on the 16-acre organic farm she runs in the Punjab plains outside Lahore.