Agriculture is Circular — Let’s keep it so

Circularity and Circular Economy, are often cited and mentioned words, these days. We will explore this interest in ‘circularity’ of late and its connection to agriculture, which is the basis of our lives and civilisations.

Simply put, when a resource in an ecosystem synergistically supports and reinforces other resources, without leaving the ecosystem, for the common good, it brings resilience to that ecosystem and this process is called circularity. Essentially, circularity is a life process and is seen in living entities.

Circularity has three core principles, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle and hence the words waste and pollution have no place in the reality of circularity. For circularity to be functional and effective, there must be multiple living entities and hence multiple resources, making the ecosystem diverse and rich.

Credit-deposit ratio is an attribute of circular economy. When deposits move out, as loans (credit) from region-x to other regions, region-x usually lags behind in development as the circularity is broken.

A region may or may not be capable of absorbing all the deposits. There could be many factors, why deposits take flight and could not be deployed as investments (credit) in the same region.

Humans initially started with selection of useful crops, animals and forest species and gradually moved to higher crop/animal improvement techniques like, hybridisation and genomic alterations for better traits and yields. This then led to mono-cropping of large swathes of agricultural land and with fewer varieties.

In fact, the top five food staples of the world (maize, rice, wheat, cassava and potato) supply 55 per cent of human caloric intake. Their cultivated varieties are also fewer. The diversity of our food ecosystems has thus reduced and so has our resilience. The ill effects, disease and pest outbreaks are being experienced from time to time, all over the world, Irish and Bengal famines being the major catastrophes.

Monoculture perils

Uniformity in agriculture is being promoted because of the massive food requirements and also for maximising profits.

Added to this, is indiscriminate use of agricultural chemicals and the onset of climate change.

The world is waking up to the idea of circularity, albeit grudgingly, but significant action is not yet happening.

After all agriculture has always been circular and we should re-introduce circularity through natural farming in a portion of our vast rain-fed agriculture which is nearly 50 per cent of our cropped area. Naysayers can be proved wrong only through honest science and research.

The writer is Deputy Managing Director, Nabard. Views expressed are personal

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