Global inflationary trends in farm produce will not die down easily and are likely to continue, union minister for science and technology Kapil Sibal said today at a conference on Agri and food Biotechnology for Food, Feed and Farmers Security.
“Policy makers need to look at holistic approach to increase productivity which should also be sustainable and eco-friendly. The green revolution, which is happening now, should become “Evergreen revolution” which is only possible by PPP model and sharing of technologies between research institutes and farmers. We should have clusters of industrial institutes and industry together where cross fertilisation of ideas can be better and more effective and flow of ideas from lab to field much faster,” said Sibal.
The main reasons for inflation in farm commodities are extreme weather conditions, increase in population, diversion from food crops to fuel crops, decrease of arable land, overuse of fertilisers and urbanisation. All this has lead to decrease in productivity and also lead to the poorest of the poor increasing dramatically. There is huge surge in energy demand by India and lots of farming land and crops are getting diverted to fuel crops, leading to shortage of available food grains.
Sibal said that crop conversion for energy purposes should be justified in terms of food security, energy capture of the product, sustainability and its impact on the ecology. There was no justification for diversion of corn for energy purposes, as is being done was done on a large scale in the US.
