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A new documentary short – released today – follows journalist Dan Saladino’s journey to meet Dr Debal Deb: the scientist saving thousands of endangered varieties, gifting future resilience to the food that half of humankind relies on. Watch it below, on YouTube, Vimeo, or with our new partners: the streaming platform WaterBear.
A life’s work to save the food that half of humankind relies on.
When corporate farming swept across Asia in the 1960s and 70s, genetically uniform rice started replacing thousands of local grains. All it will take is one new disease, and without diversity, it is doomed to extinction.
Journalist, Dan Saladino, is a forager of endangered food stories in this fragile world. The film follows his encounter with Dr Debal Deb who, over 30 years, has conserved 1,460 indigenous rice varieties from the most remote tribes of India. Each is meticulously cultivated on Basudha Farm in an ever-growing patchwork that maintains the genetic genotypes year on year.
Every grain saved gifts us resilience: some withstand floods or high winds, seawater or drought. Others have medicinal properties. One has twenty times the amount of iron promised by genetically modified ‘iron fortified’ strains. Every staggering idiosyncrasy is backed up by rigorous scientific testing in Debal’s Calcutta lab.
We owe this edible diversity to thousands of years of innovation by our ancestors. Today, Debal is putting his seed bank, unparalleled anywhere else in the world, back into the hands of local farmers so they can regain their sovereignty.Named Vrīhi – Sanskrit for rice – Debal hopes “it will germinate in the minds of the people, as well as in the fields”. We all need to know his story. Like the rice he has saved, Debal’s ideas are too precious to be lost.
“We need those drought-tolerant varieties, those varieties that can grow in different challenging conditions, and that’s why the work is so important and so relevant today.” Dan Saladino in conversation with Dr Debal Deb
“I never knew that the little box of my personal stories of agony and joy, pried open by Dan Saladino, would fascinate so many people. When I saw tears in a few eyes of some of these exceptional audience members, I felt blessed and humbled.” Dr Debal Deb in conversation with Dan Saladino
