Surinder Sud: Where's all the wheat gone?

FARM VIEW

Ill-conceived and mis-timed policy moves led to official agencies' failure to procure adequate quantities.

Where has all the wheat gone? Why has its production been stagnant for the past six years? Did the agriculture ministry falter in assessing this year's wheat output? These are some critical questions connected with the current wheat crisis.

Wheat scientists, even while conceding that wheat production has reached a plateau, are disinclined to accept that it has nose-dived this year to a mere 69 million tonnes, the lowest in several years. Field surveys carried out by the Karnal-based Directorate of Wheat Research (DWR) had indicated prospects of a good wheat harvest, maintains DWR director B Mishra. "Wheat output could in no way be below 71 to 72 million tonnes," asserts Jag Shoran, principal investigator with the all-India coordinated Wheat Improvement Project.

This exposes Krishi Bhawan's bid to use low production plea to cover up its ill-conceived and mis-timed policy moves that led to the failure of official agencies to procure adequate quantities of grain for the public distribution system (PDS) and other programmes. Obviously, much of the wheat has been mopped up by wheat-based industries and private trade by offering the growers prices marginally higher than the official prices. Also, some farmers are holding on to a part of their produce in the hope of getting better realisation in the lean period.

If that's so, it should not be a matter of much concern. For, this wheat, regardless of who is holding (or, going by the typical government vocabulary, hoarding) it, has to come out sooner or later. What is worrisome is the plateauing of wheat productivity and production, for which the reasons are several and deep rooted.

The soils in the country's main north-western wheat bowl have become fatigued due to cultivation of exhaustive crops of wheat and rice over a long period. This has lowered input-use efficiency as reflected by the poor response to higher doses of fertilisers, notably nitrogen. Besides, the soils have been depleted of vital secondary and micro plant nutrients, such as sulphur, zinc, iron, molybdenum and boron. Optimum crop yields are impossible without correcting this nutritional imbalance.

What is worse, the continuous intensive cultivation of land without using adequate organic manures has deprived it of its carbon content, impairing its inherent fertility. The carbon content of soils in several pockets of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and other regions has dropped below 0.3 per cent, against the minimum desired 0.5 per cent.

Significantly, many people attribute the productivity stagnation also to the non-availability of wheat varieties that could trigger another quantum jump in yield. And this is not unfounded either. Wheat scientists are least hesitant to concede that the kind of gene pool that generated the Green Revolution varieties was no longer available to wheat breeders. This limits their capacity to develop wheat varieties having yield potential substantially higher than that of the current best ones. The scientists have somehow managed to maintain a continuous flow of new and marginally better varieties to replace the aged strains.

Efforts are now directed to tap the wild gene pool to pierce through the current yield barrier. For this, the use of synthetics as well as the Chinese germplasm is on the anvil. Besides, cross-breeding of winter and spring wheat is mooted to get to a desirable combination of genes. But these attempts will take five to six years to show results, the scientists feel.

Development of hybrid wheat is another option being pursued. Though some wheat hybrids were produced a few years ago through chemically-induced hybridisation, these did not prove too successful. Besides, the cost of seed production was too high in that case. The new approach is to produce hybrids by using plants with sterile male parts. Such hybrids are believed to be more practical and economical.

This apart, there are several other ways of raising wheat production. The most significant among them is to bridge the current yield gap between research farms and farmers' fields. The productivity potential of some of the available wheat varieties is as high as 7 tonnes a hectare, against the national average yield of 2.7 tonnes a hectare. Yield level of around 5 tonnes a hectare is quite common in progressive farmers' fields in the north-western region. Thus, if the national average could be raised even marginally, the country can bag 8 to 10 million tonnes of additional wheat from the same area.