Overview of Sikkim State
Sikkim is a small and multi-ethnic state located on the Eastern Himalayas.
It has a geographical area of 7,096km2 and is a mountainous region with wide variations in slopes and altitude with 30% the area covered by perpetual snow.
Human population is settled within an area of 2500km2.
Today all the Sikkim state in India is 100% organic state and the first organic state in the world.
They won a prestigious award granted by the Food Ariculture Organization of the United Nations on October 2018.
Introduction of EM Technology
Since 2003, Sikkim state started with their organic vision and the government reduced to subsidize sintetic inputs by 10% year by year.
At the same time, they started to do significant investments in farming education and composting.
Since then, our partner in India, Maple Orgtech (India) Pvt. Ltd, became part of this mission and launched workshops to educate environment related officials on how to use EM in composting and farming.
Later, Maple continued educating farmers and villagers on field farm training under the support of the State State Department of Agriculture.
Working at the ground level with farmers, Maple was commited to teach the concept of EM Technology to promote organic farming.
Because it was very difficult to convert farmers into organic, Maple thought that success would be the result of determination, strategy and willpower.
Therefore, in 2009 farmers took oath in a training session organized by Maple to convert Sikkim into a fully organic state.
Maple is also conducting demonstrations at village meetings to ensure the trust of farmers in using EM products.
Results
The first step towards to conversion of Sikkim state into organic was the adoption of bio-village programme using EM technology.
Since 2003, 396 villages were considered as bio-villages by the Department of Food Security and Agriculture Development in collaboration with Maple Orgtech (India) Ltd.
Approximately 15,000 farmers and 14,000 acres of land in Sikkim were benefited under the programme.
Moreover, important soil enrichment and plant-protection formulations were demonstrated applying EM Compost, EM Bokashi, EM FPE and EM･5.
Today, EM is a familiar term to most of the farming community at Sikkim (2018).
*Outcome Graph from Sikkim Organic Mission
Dreams Come True
On October 15th 2018, India had the “100 percent organic state”, Sikkim, that won the “Oscar for best policies”, conferred by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for being the world’s best policies promoting agro-ecological and sustainable food systems.
Sikkim won this award beating 51 nominated policies from 25 countries.