Nazir Ujjan

Nazir Ujjan is showing small and landless farmers how they can use seed banks, coupled with access to technology to break the cycle of reliance on moneylenders and large landowners, overcoming many challenge in the rural area where he has been working where only five percent of the arable land is owned by small farmers and functional literacy is minimal.

Nazir's key insight is that if small farmers organize, through persistence and sharing they can gain access to the high quality seed they need to multiply crop yields and reduce their indebtedness. By coupling the seeds with better planting and cultivation techniques, farmers can boost their yields even further, to three hundred percent or more. This allows them to remove their indebtedness and stockpile the resources they need - including seed, and organic fertilizer and trees - to maintain the viability of the land they are farming.

Farmers face three types of problems. The first are systemic and are related to the collapse of government efforts to maintain the highly developed canal system in rural areas. As a result, large amounts of previously cultivable land have become either leached out or waterlogged. A second level of problem is that of small farmers trying to compete as producers. Functional illiteracy condemns most of these people to lack access to technology, information and political clout. Finally, their day-to-day activities are controlled by money lenders and large landowners, who treat them as virtual slaves.

Nazir's approach is to bridge the illiteracy gap by organizing the small (use local resources encourage successful farmers in sharing seeds with other farmers by donations to the seed bank) farmers into groups demanding they be given the same high quality seed normally reserved for the choicest plots of the large landowners. He does this by approaching government extension agents, taking the local monopoly supplier to court, and courting outside suppliers with promises of interest from a broad group of potential purchasers. In Bozdar Wada, where Nazir has piloted his approach, the results have been dramatic. Through a combination of better seed, improved planting and cultivation, yields increased three hundred percent. Small farmers removed their indebtedness and used the surplus to develop an Agricultural Development Center to continue to reach out to small impoverished farmers by offering them a "seed bank" to use as a catalyst for their own development efforts. But the Center is, first and foremost, a Center for purchasing a village's seed, distributing it and offering training to the Center's members. The Center offers a program for cultivating manure yards (as opposed to relying on costly chemical fertilizers) as well as a farmer's school for members now eager to learn as much as they can about new farming techniques. In Nazir's pilot project, the organization has grown to cover twenty villages comprising two thousand farmers cultivating three thousand six hundred acres. Most importantly, the seed bank and vegetable groups are independent, self-sustaining bodies. The organization has the ability to use its seed bank surpluses to start two new Agricultural Development Centers each year - i.e., effectively making a grant to give a group of small farmers in another village the means to create the kinds of yields that will relieve them from debt.Nazir's program as it is currently constituted is self-sustaining. It relies on member cash and in kind contributions to run the organization's activities and generate a surplus that it shares with other villages to "seed" their own development efforts.To assist farmers' groups across the country, Nazir has begun to travel and publicize the experience of his pilot as well as share the information he has compiled on seed quality, as well as best practice type advice on planting, cultivation and farmer organization. His vision is of a broad network of these local Agricultural Development Centers as a counter-weight to landed interests across the country.

Born in 1973, Nazir Ujjan grew up in Bozdar Wada in the Khampur District of Sindh. Nazir's father died when he was young and his father's brother, who took him in, went insane. In spite of this Nazir managed to graduate from high school with the assistance of friends. While still in school he organized drives to raise money for other children who needed money to pay their school fees.Nazir found himself drawn to debate in school and gained a reputation as adept at resolving conflicts. In 1991 when rival religious sects clashed in his District, it was Nazir who intervened and resolved the conflict after District officials had tried and failed. He is a fountain of new ideas, from "income generation shops" for his farmers to rent out wheelbarrows and other equipment to a series of credit and savings schemes for members of the Agricultural Development Centers.