Surinder Sud: Partners in agri knowledge

FARM VIEW

The proposed India-US knowledge initiative on agriculture, announced jointly by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W Bush in Washington in July, seems to be taking off. A knowledge initiative board with two co-chairs representing the two countries is going to be set up soon to concretise a work plan. For this purpose, a formal pact was signed during the recent visit of US trade representative JB Penn to India.

Significantly, this initiative is being conceived as a coequal partnership that will help the two countries mutually achieve important goals and jointly assist even others in need. What is even more significant is that it views private sector involvement as its key feature. As such, it envisages the private sector to help identify research areas that have the potential for rapid commercialisation. The objective being to develop new and commercially viable technologies for agricultural advancement in both countries.

Of course, the overall scope of this initiative is fairly vast, encompassing agricultural education; collaborative research in fields such as biotechnology, natural resources management, weather patterns and farm economies; information and communication technologies specifically for the farm sector; commercialisation of technologies; and compliance with international standards and WTO issues concerning sanitary and phytosanitary aspects.

Considering the work that the proposed initiative has set out for itself, it is clear that this will keep both the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) as well as the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) fairly busy. And, if it succeeds in achieving its goals, it will result in substantial additional capacity building even these two apex bodies, besides benefiting the farm sectors in both the countries.

Fortunately, this development has come about at a time when the Indian farm sector needed it the most. The agricultural revolution of the 1960s is showing signs of fatigue and needs a fresh dose of technology "" market-oriented production technology, to be precise "" to cope with contemporary issues that are completely different from the ones addressed by the earlier Green Revolution technology. The present issues concern areas such as global warming, new pest-disease regimes, natural resource depletion, growing domestic and international competition, and decelerating profitability of agriculture.

These challenges require new approaches to cope with. A backgrounder on the initiative, prepared by the ICAR, clearly indicates the need for multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional inputs for supplementing conventional technologies with cutting-edge technologies. The US and India, being leaders in different fields of science and technology, hold considerable scope for complementing each others' capabilities by forging strategic alliances in critical areas concerning the agricultural sector in both the countries.

Technology apart, market-related issues have now become more crucial than before for the agriculture sector. Instead of production-driven markets, now, the norm globally is market-driven production. And that, unfortunately, is a rather weak area in India. Shifts in demand patterns and pressure of global competition are asserting significant influence on agricultural markets. Public and private sector decision-makers require more information on how the markets operate and the implications of the various reforms options. Also, thanks to the rapid ascent of commodity markets, the need for honest and elaborate market intelligence has become vital.

At present, India lacks an effective institutional mechanism to generate reliable reports on agriculture and commodity outlook, which are essential for the proper management of commodity trade, inflation and other related activities. The proposed effort under the joint initiative to cover this lacuna is, therefore, welcome. It plans to develop models for preparing food and commodity outlook reports on the pattern of the ones issued by the USDA and the Food and Policy Research Institute at the Iowa State University.

The National Centre for Agricultural and Economic Policy Research (NCAP) of the ICAR has initiated an exercise to understand the nuances of agricultural markets and come out with agriculture and food outlook reports, but it still has far to go in terms of experience and efficiency to do so. The proposed collaboration in this field will, therefore, be highly useful for it to fine-tune and upgrade its expertise in this field for the benefit of farmers and the commodity trade.