The Hindu Business Line : Indian agriculture at crossroads

India has by now had the benefit of half a century of planning on the farm front. One important way of assessing a country’s true independence is to critically examine how independent it is in terms of food security.

After all, no country can be termed truly independent if its food requirements are met even partly by imports, like India’s are. More so, when politicians and the farm fraternity have been claiming for almost two decades now, that India, indeed, is “self-sufficient” in food.

Pre-Independence phase

There has been a wrong notion that the Bengal famine was caused due to food shortage per se. A critical scrutiny of the facts reveal that Indians died in thousands not because of shortage of food, but because, first, much of what wa s produced in the country was carted off to meet the War efforts of the Imperial masters; and second, the failure to deliver food on time where it was most needed due to inefficient transport system.

It has been a myth that has been propagated for long that this was the prime reason to seek foreign “aid” — the Public Loan (PL) 480 programme of the US in food — and a subsequent justification to turn to the US to guide India’s agricultural destiny. There is another myth — more than 5.5 million tonnes of foodgrains, primarily wheat, were “exported” during the NDA regime at very low prices, causing severe loss to the exchequer, on the pretext that India was surplus in food, while in reality millions of Indians were starving.

‘Industrial agriculture’

It was in the late 1950s and early 1960s that industrial agriculture, also called the ‘Green Revolution’, was launched on Indian soil. The main feature of this industrial agriculture was “high-input technology” — primarily chemical fertilisers and pesticides — coupled with copious irrigation water.

The International Centre for Maize and Wheat Research in Mexico was experimenting with dwarf wheat which needed heavy doses of chemical fertilisers. The American factories, which were manufacturing lethal chemicals as a War effort to support the Allies (the UK and France), were converted to produce chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and Washington was in desperate need of finding a market for these products.

India was a vast market, and it had no fertiliser plants of its own. The dwarf wheat was brought into India, the seeds multiplied, and undivided Punjab chosen as the ‘cradle’ for this industrial agriculture, because the State already had plenty of water.The virgin soils of Punjab initially responded with huge yields, but by the mid-1970s, yields began to plateau, rampant diseases such as the rust erupted like wild-fire, and with them the spread of the deadly Parthenium weed — imported along with the contaminated wheat.

A similar situation was unfolding with rice. The Ford Foundation took the lead in establishing the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Manila, Philippines, and the Washington-controlled Consultative Group for International Research in Agriculture backed the project. Following Richard Nixon’s dictum to use food as a weapon, the game-plan for India was to seize, either through covert administrative and/or political pressure or through monetary lure, the vast and varied (more than 25,000) rare rice germplasm under the control of the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, Orissa. This game-plan was scuttled by Dr Riccharia, who was then the Director of the Institute.

Technology ‘fatigue’

By the late 1970s, the once-fertile soils of Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh were beginning to show fatigue — soil degradation, ground-water pollution with excessive chemicals, aquifers drying up and vanishing bio-diversity due to the continuous rice-wheat monoculture. Farmers were beginning to question the advisability of chemical agriculture, and organic farming started to catch on. But many protagonists of the Green Revolution wanted an ‘Evergreen Revolution’ and in came the genetically modified crops.

Once again, the inspiration was from the US. A private MNC engaged in global agribusiness introduced the Bt cotton for an unheard of price of Rs 1,950 for a 450-gm packet, while the native hybrid cost just Rs 350. In Vidarbha district of Maharashtra, the ‘cotton bowl’ of India, thousands of farmers committed suicide when the crop failed, their investments in seed and fertilisers not matching the cotton price, which is a monopoly control.

During the Tenth Plan period, agricultural growth was just 1.78 per cent, while the target was 4 per cent. In 2001, New Delhi dismantled the quantitative restrictions on more than 2,000 items, of which the majority were agricultural products. Pricey American and Australian apples filled up the shelves of classy departmental stores in the metros, while cheap Vietnam pepper and Guatemalan cardamom edged out the once-famous Malabar pepper and Wynad cardamom.

The once-prosperous Malabar and Wynad regions saw thousands of farmers committing suicide, and the State could do nothing to stop the Washington-inspired liberalisation policies. New Delhi’s focus shifted from the primary agriculture sector to the services sector, primarily the IT sector. Cheap farm credit was unavailable, and small and marginal farmers felt throttled. Extension services were in a shambles.

Impact of globalisation

When the UPA Government came to power in 2004, the National Commission on Farmers, constituted during the previous NDA government, saw a change of guard. More than three years down the line, farmers’ suicides continue unabated and the newfound enthusiasm for the Special Economic Zones is taking away prime agricultural land for purposes other than agriculture.

A passing mention has to be made here with regard to the ongoing WTO negotiations. The most-recent draft modalities for agriculture and non-agricultural market access on industrial tariffs need to be balanced, as the latter does not appear to be in the interests of the developing countries, as they would be subject to steeper tariff cuts.

The challenges ahead

Food import, in all probability, will become a permanent feature, unless we correct it now. India’s agricultural policy must be ‘grain-centric’ like that of China, which does not allow shrinkage of cultivable area (69 per cent as of now) put under food-grains. Two important aspects of farming that must be addressed on a war footing are implementation of a clear water-use policy and energising its extension activities.

Sadly, despite huge investment, India has failed to harness the potential of rain-fed areas due to faulty water-use planning like giving undue importance to mammoth irrigation projects. A better alternative would be to have a number of decentralised minor irrigation projects focussing on local water resources, which must include water harvesting as well.

As of now, the weakest link in India’s agricultural efforts is its totally inefficient extension services. Only 0.9 per cent of the farmers make use of the hundreds of Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) spread across the length and breadth of the country. Close to half-a-lakh of village and block-level extension workers with no knowledge of the advances in technology are but a financial burden on the exchequer.

The third most important factor is the easy availability of credit. Despite a plethora of credit agencies, including Nabard, the farmer is still at the mercy of the unscrupulous money-lender. The interest rate is undoubtedly important, but more important is the efficiency and speed of lending that is totally absent in governmental lending agencies, that is at the root of much farmer distress. This needs to be addressed with ruthless efficiency.

The only way forward for Indian agriculture is when agricultural scientists and technologists consider the Indian farmer as a collaborator rather than just a ‘target’ of their research and/or innovation. In terms of infrastructure and fund support, India has the largest public-funded agricultural sector in the world, next to the US. By comparison, countries like China and Brazil are far behind. Yet, these two countries have much more to show on the farm now than India can.

Sixty years after Independence and 10 Five-Year Plans later, Indian agriculture is still at the crossroads. In all probability, India will once again import close to 5 million tonnes of wheat. Last year, it imported 5.5 million tonnes. Instead of helping farmers grow more, the nation lives on imported food.

The author is an international agricultural scientist and former Professor, National Science Foundation, The Royal Society, Belgium.