Turning over a New Leaf

BACK IN 2008, when Abhiram Seth, the then director in-charge of PepsiCo’s exports in agriculture, was leaving the company, he decided to check upon what plans his firm held for its seaweed cultivation project.

Seth had been deeply involved in it. He was at the meeting when a client suggested exploring India’s long coastline for cultivating seaweed. And he was placed in charge, when PepsiCo, having got together a community of fishermen and women in Tamil Nadu and taking the knowhow from Indian scientists working on growing seaweed, established a seaweed cultivation programme as part of its CSR activities.

PepsiCo extracted carrageenan from the seaweed, a product used in a host of industries. And the entire programme, although relatively small, began to do well, with over 700 locals from fishing communities in Tamil Nadu, a majority of them women, becoming involved in harvesting seaweed.

But what Seth heard when he asked about the future of the project did not seem uplifting. He was told that the programme would be shut down, he recalls, unless his successor chose to continue with it. “They were frank about it. The programme wasn’t really a part of their core agenda,” he recalls. So Seth decided to buy this division from the multinational. “It looked like a good semi-retirement business to do. Even if it failed, you wouldn’t make a big loss. Plus, I had become a bit attached to it,” he says.

Seth established AquAgri, a company that over time would not just extract carrageenan from the seaweed sold to them, but also use it to develop what it calls biostimulant products that can be used in agriculture for better yields. Although his company has been growing fairly rapidly—locals from some 25 to 30 sites across Tamil Nadu’s coastline now cater to its needs—seaweed cultivation has continued to remain overall a small and somewhat obscure business in the country. This, at a time when the seaweed market is expanding rapidly globally, as more and more businesses begin to look closely at the potential of this type of plant, with some estimates claiming the market was worth $10.6 billion in 2016 and will reach $26.1 billion by the end of 2025.

But India, despite its vast coastline and the large variety of seaweed that grows wild by its shore, has remained an insignificant player.

This could change now with the Government actively looking to push this new form of aqua-cultivation. It allocated about Rs 640 crore for developing the seaweed industry last year. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Union Budget earlier in 2021, announced that the Government would be setting up a multipurpose seaweed park in Tamil Nadu.

During a recent webinar on the development of the seaweed industry organised by the National Co-operative Development Corporation, Rajeev Ranjan, the secretary of the Department of Fisheries at the Centre, revealed that the Government wanted to increase seaweed production in the country from 2,500 tonnes now to 11.5 lakh tonnes in the next five years. This, he said, could be achieved by using just 1 per cent of the country’s approximately 8,000-km-long coastline. “Even if India aims only for the lowhanging fruit in the sector, it can easily achieve the target,” he was reported as saying.

Seth is excited by this newfound focus on seaweed from the Government. “With the Government’s help, the seaweed industry could take off here,” he says.

For the most part, seaweed is used in several parts of the world for the extraction of carrageenan and agars, which are types of compounds found in the cell walls of seaweed and used in the production of a vast number of everyday products like toothpastes, ice-creams, shampoos, skin creams, and many other such products. Seaweed is also used in the development of biofertilisers which can help boost crop yields.

But seaweed’s proponents believe this humble aquatic plant has a tremendous amount of untapped potential. According to them, it can transform the way we humans live. In it, they say, could lie the answers to some of the most pressing issues of our times, from combating food shortages and rehabilitating our oceans to mitigating the effects of climate change.

Dinabandhu Sahoo, a professor of botany at the University of Delhi and vice chancellor of Fakir Mohan University in Balasore in Odisha, says land-based agriculture has become increasingly untenable. It is not just that agriculture is vulnerable to drought and inclement weather, he says, but it is also environmentally destructive. “Why not look at seaweed as a source of food?” he asks.

Seaweed, as he points out, has been found to be rich in proteins, vitamins and iodine. And yet, apart from countries in the Far East and Southeast Asia, very few have looked at it seriously as a form of food. Seaweed is one of the world’s most sustainable and nutritious crops since it requires neither fresh water nor fertiliser. It is also sturdy and grows at a terrific rate, with farmers in India harvesting seaweed crops in just 45-day cycles. “Turning to seaweed as a food source ensures you aren’t just getting nutrition. You are also contributing to environmental conservation,” says Sahoo.

Sahoo has been pushing for a greater use of seaweed in India for several decades. One of the leading researchers in algae, he’s worked in several coastal areas to promote seaweed farming in India. A few years ago, he even led a large all-India network project where researchers supported fishing communities to take up this form of cultivation.

He traces his fascination with seaweed to the time when, while interacting with a Japanese student (living in the same Delhi hostel as Sahoo was as part of a student exchange programme), noticed him consuming seaweed. “I was born and raised by the coast in Puri (Odisha) and was familiar with seaweed,” he says. But Sahoo, then a young botanist, didn’t know this humble aquatic plant could be consumed or had so many properties. Since then, Sahoo has travelled to various Far Eastern and Southeast Asian countries to learn more about these aquatic plants and the ways in which they can be cultivated, before pushing for their adoption in India.

Some years ago, to demonstrate the ability of seaweed in controlling carbon emissions, he strapped a water tank filled with seaweed immersed in water upon his Maruti 800 car, and had the car’s tailpipe connected to the tank through a tube. It was a carbon-neutral car, he says. The seaweed in the tank, which he had grown in his lab, was capturing the carbon dioxide from the emissions and converting it into oxygen. “One kg of algae can capture about 1.8 kg of carbon dioxide and produce 1.6 kg of oxygen,” he says.

It wasn’t the most convenient way to get around in Delhi—the professor squinting in concentration, the water jostling in the tank above him—but it was a good way to capture attention, he says. He eventually stopped using the tank once he began travelling away from Delhi more frequently. But he hopes that with many automobile companies now increasingly in the lookout for ways to control carbon emissions, some will one day pick upon his idea.

OVER 800 SPECIES of seaweed have so far been found in India. They grow abundantly along the coast of Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Rich seaweed beds have also been found in other places, such as Ratnagiri in
Maharashtra, Goa, Karwar in Karnataka, Varkala and Vizhinjam in Kerala, and Chilika Lake in Odisha.

The most commercially important among them, the red seaweed species known as Kappaphycus alvarezii, however, is a species originally native to the Philippines’ coastline. According to a scientist, who requested anonymity since he is not authorised to speak, the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSMCRI) which is affiliated to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, acquired this species and began to first try to grow it on Indian shores in the late 1980s. The researchers were hoping to tap into the increasing need for carrageenan and agar by industries.

The field got a boost when PepsiCo, licensing the technology from CSMCRI, began to cultivate seaweed commercially. “CSMCRI had started with just 5 grams of plant (seaweed) material brought from a lab in Japan. We (at PepsiCo) waited for about two years for seed multiplication before we began planting it,” Seth says.

A large proportion of seaweed farmers in India tends to be women. Many of them, with the support of corporates such as PepsiCo before and AquAgri now, apart from NGOs and researchers, have come together to form small local self-help groups. These women, who previously were unemployed or helped out their fishermen husbands, now form the big chunk of the workforce, going through the whole procedure of tying seaweed seedlings to ropes or rafts, preparing the planting material and, usually 45 days after first planting the seaweed in relatively shallow water, harvesting the crop, and then cleaning and drying it. “This is one of the remarkable things about the cultivation in India: the kind of opportunities it has provided to these poor coastal families,” Seth says.

But the last four years have not been good for seaweed cultivation. The increase in ocean temperatures because of global warming, Seth says, has led to a sharp decline in crop yields. The vigour of the planting material has also come down. “There is a great need for fresh planting material to be introduced,” he says.

This reduction in crop yield has also led to many of these farmers forsaking their profession. AquAgri once had over 1,200 fishermen and women supplying seaweed to them. Now, less than 400 do. Its peak of processing about 2,000 tonnes of dry seaweed annually has also come down to about 400 tonnes. To deal with the shortage, Seth says, the company has in fact had to import carrageenan.

“We are still growing well. In fact, we see major growth possibilities in the bio-stimulant market, which can be used (to increase crop yields),” Seth says. “The Government interest has come at a good time. There is tremendous potential. It just needs a little attention.”

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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