Bhutan Aims to Be The First Fully Organic Nation

It banned tele­vi­sion until 1999, keeps out mass tourism to shield its cul­ture from for­eign influ­ence, and most recently set up a weekly “pedes­tri­ans’ day” on Tuesdays that sees cars banned from town centers.

Its deter­mi­na­tion to chart a dif­fer­ent path can be seen in its new pol­icy to phase out arti­fi­cial chem­i­cals in farm­ing in the next 10 years, mak­ing its sta­ple foods of wheat and pota­toes, as well as its fruits, 100 per­cent organic.

“Bhutan has decided to go for a green econ­omy in light of the tremen­dous pres­sure we are exert­ing on the planet,” Agriculture Minister Pema Gyamtsho told AFP in an inter­view by tele­phone from the cap­i­tal Thimphu. “If you go for very inten­sive agri­cul­ture it would imply the use of so many chem­i­cals, which is not in keep­ing with our belief in Buddhism, which calls for us to live in har­mony with nature.”

Bhutan has a pop­u­la­tion of just over 700,000, two-thirds of whom depend on farm­ing in vil­lages dot­ted around fer­tile south­ern plains near India and the soar­ing Himalayan peaks and deep val­leys to the north.

Overwhelmingly forested, no more than three per­cent of the country’s land area is used for grow­ing crops, says Gyamtsho, with the major­ity of farm­ers already organic and reliant on rot­ting leaves or com­post as a nat­ural fertilizer.

“Only farm­ers in areas that are acces­si­ble by roads or have easy trans­port have access to chem­i­cals,” he explained, say­ing chem­i­cal use was already “very low” by inter­na­tional standards.

In the large val­leys, such as the one cradling the sleepy cap­i­tal Thimphu, chem­i­cals are used to kill a local weed that is dif­fi­cult to take out by hand—a chal­lenge com­pounded by a lack of farm labour.

Elsewhere, the fer­tiliser urea is some­times added to soil, while a fungi­cide to con­trol leaf rust on wheat is also available.

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