Facilitating a higher role for the private sector to ensure reasonable returns to farmers will make Indian agriculture sustainable, said industry and government representatives at a seminar.
“Bring together the industry, the suppliers and buyers along with producers and make the right climate available for investments and for increase in productivity and employment. Only when this is addressed can there be a second agrarian revolution,” said IYR Krishna Rao, state principal secretary, agriculture, marketing and cooperation department. He was delivering the inaugural address at a CII seminar on partnering and innovating for sustainable agriculture here on Saturday.
He said there was a need to emulate the Chinese experience, where labour-intensive small-scale industrial enterprises were augmenting rural incomes. Besides, initiatives in contract farming should be encouraged.
ITC Limited-Agri Business Division chief executive S Sivakumar said policy makers should try and balance the interests of farmers and consumers by enhancing productivity levels in agriculture. In this, the private sector role was crucial as the government’s role alone was not going to bring necessary changes.
The government could think of reforming the existing laws related to marketing, increasing competition, and introducing customised extension to achieve sustainability in agriculture, he said.
Policy environment not conducive
According to Gyanendra Shukla, director of Monsanto Holdings Private Limited, policy environment in the country has not been conducive for private players to bring in newer technologies that effectively reduce the cost of agriculture apart from increasing productivity.
For example, he said, 50-60 per cent of the investment in cotton cultivation on Monday was on account of labour costs, which could be overcome by introducing mechanised harvesting. This could be possible only if the seed varieties suitable for mechanised harvesting were developed.
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While Monsanto was already working on developing such varieties outside India, it was unsure of the pricing environment here to make investments required for developing these varieties for Indian farmers, he said.
The company operates a call centre-type system for farmers who use Monsanto seeds to address their crop related problems. At present, 400,000 farmers are being covered by this facility and it aims to increase this number to 3 million in the next five years through expanding the services in all the major Indian languages including Telugu and Gujarati, according to him.