Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said agricultural growth rate should be doubled to 4 per cent to ensure food security in the country.
Addressing a gathering during the convocation of G B Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Singh said our agricultural production should increase at a rate fast enough to ensure food security for our growing population.
"We must endeavour to raise our agricultural growth rate from around 2 per cent per annum to 4 per cent. I have no doubt that we can overcome all these challenges, given sustained efforts and an approach different from business as usual," he said.
"To increase production, we must increase our farm yields because the scope for increasing the area under cultivation and under irrigation is rather limited," he said.
The agriculture sector recorded the lowest growth in five years, at 0.2 per cent, in 2009-10 due to widespread drought. The sector had grown by 1.6 per cent in the previous fiscal. The government has set a target of 4 per cent agriculture growth per annum in the 11th Five-Year Plan (2007-12).
Singh said without solid support from agricultural scientists and technologies it would be impossible for us to achieve our production targets. Stating that there is a widespread feeling that there has not been any really big breakthrough in agricultural technologies since the green revolution of the late 1960s, the Prime Minister said this is a real challenge to the ICAR system, to our agriculture universities and our agriculture scientists.