Barun Roy: We don't have a choice

ASIA FILE

If raising farmer incomes is our goal, farming must seek innovative production and delivery methods.

At a meeting on the side of the global climate change conference in Bali, experts once again drew attention to issues about agriculture that can no longer be ignored. Will self-seeking, vote-bank politicians listen?

New industries, roads and urban areas aren't the only things robbing the world of productive farmland. More serious is the threat embedded in the very state of our agriculture. As the experts pointed out, soil erosion and other forms of land degradation are eating up five to seven million hectares of farmland every year. Some 30 million hectares have been lost to water logging and salinity already, and the depredation continues to claim 1.5 million additional hectares each year. Besides, there's the methane effect on climate. The very act of growing rice, which feeds more than half the world's population, emits some 50-100 million tonnes of this harmful gas into the atmosphere yearly, making agriculture even more vulnerable.

What's the world doing about it? What are we in India going to do about it? Do our politicians realise that the problem is graver than the flippant game they play of nailing opponents for immediate political gain?

In a recent position paper outlining its strategy for the period from 2007 to 2015, the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) states the problem even more bluntly. It asks people to accept the fact that arable land available to agriculture will only keep shrinking.

In the next 25 years, 55 per cent of Asia's population will be urban-based, against one-third at present, due not only to continued population growth but also to increasing rural-urban migration. This means more land will be needed for housing, factories and roads, as well as to grow new varieties of crops to suit new lifestyles, and that has to come out of land available for rice. The chop will inevitably fall on the most productive agricultural land.

Thus, to keep pace with demand, even more rice will have to be produced from a shrinking land area, with less water, less cost and probably less available labour. At the same time, yields from rain-fed land must go up to compensate for the inevitable loss of favourable irrigated land.

But rice alone won't be able to lift farmers out of poverty. Continuous rice cultivation is no longer relevant or profitable, says IRRI. Besides, yields are falling off. From 2.5 per cent a year during the first two decades of the Green Revolution, the growth in rice yield has declined to about 1.1 per cent a year since the late 1980s. Farmers must look to diversify into higher-value crops requiring less water, as well as livestock, to earn the income that will make them stay on the farm. Even within rice, there's an increasing need to move into value-added products, such as nutritious rice. Farms must also learn to do with fewer workers to stay viable.

What IRRI and other experts are saying makes one thing very clear. We must be sober enough to accept the realities of the new agricultural situation, within the compulsions of altered economic, demographic and climatic parameters, and not to indulge in cheap, emotional politics over petty land grab issues that only serve to misguide farmers. Those who want to shield farmers from these new realities and keep them entrenched in their traditional role and present marginal state are actually their enemies.

The pressures and the challenges should be obvious to everyone: How to make the best of a worsening situation: shrinking land area, self-defeating farming practices, diminishing water resources, falling incomes and adverse climatic conditions. It's not going to be easy. It's beyond the powers of farmers. It's beyond even the powers of governments alone. It requires the deployment of technology, scientific research and marketing forces on a scale that demands a bigger and more active involvement of the private corporate sector alongside governments and individual farmers. In this matter of utmost importance, the three shouldn't be looked upon as enemies with mutually exclusive interests.

As IRRI points out, technological progress in rice cultivation has slowed substantially since the early 1990s. Recovering some of that momentum is, therefore, the primary goal of the institute's new strategic plan. In the changed agricultural situation, developing "climate-friendly" varieties that can withstand extreme conditions of drought or submergence has become more important, and genetic improvement has become a key necessity.

Agriculture, thus, has entered an area where big investments are called for, as much in seed development, mechanisation and post-harvest processing as in linking scientific advances with the real-world problems of both farmers and consumers. If raising farmer incomes is our goal, farming must get out of its age-old trap and seek innovative production and delivery methods. We've got to involve the corporate sector. The danger signals are out and we don't really have a choice.