*Note- This is an excerpt of the speeches made by different dignitaries.This is not a typical editorial instead an account of most important things of those speeches.The editorial discusses just about everything with related to agriculture and by the end of it you will be able to answer many question and have holistic understanding of it and some more.
If you thought that you know everything about agriculture, you certainly don’t.
Food for thought :-
- What is brown revolution in agriculture ?
- Why Rajasthan farmers don’t commit suicide much ?
- How to double the income of Indian household -Is the Prime Minister of India is day dreaming ?
- What is precision farming.
- Vertical farming – do we really need it – or is it just that we mention it because we think it is fancy.
- What is the potential for post-harvest value addition ?
- Farming not only needs cows and buffaloes but also cloud computing- Really ?
- What is UBERISATION- booking a cab in UBER ? – Not really
- What are custom-hiring centers ?
Read on to find out.
Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje kicked off the three-day agri-tech meet, GRAM 2016, in Jaipur recently. She promised to transform the state’s agricultural landscape by actively promoting global best practices and invited the corporates to join hands with farmers to modernise agriculture in the state.
Two sessions were scheduled for the first day; on sustainable measures towards achieving the goal of doubling farm incomes and discussion on the way forward in the Rajasthan-Israel partnership.
Ashok Gulati, Infosys Chair Professor, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) chaired the first session. He called Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s target of doubling farmer incomes by 2022 “very ambitious”. Gulati queried if by doubling farm incomes, the prime minister meant real incomes or the nominal incomes as both are very different things.
Gulati told the audience that India’s household incomes grew by a meagre 3.5 per cent between 2002-03 to 2012-13. He noted that during the same period, Rajasthan did much better and its farmers’ household incomes grew at a decent pace of 7.5 per cent. However, to double the farm incomes nationally in the next six years, the required growth is 12 per cent per annum which is an uphill task.
But despite this scepticism, Gulati raised important questions: Where will the increased income come from? How do we get there?
And the idea is not to just grow but also to make sure that the yields are sustainable over long term and equitable. Gulati pointed out to some side-effects of the green revolution. While this greatly increased prosperity in the regions of Haryana and Punjab, these states have seen their water table depleting. Hence, simply increasing yields is not sufficient, he said.
Gulati contended that India needs to move from green to gene to brown revolution in agriculture.
What is ‘brown’ revolution? It relates to focusing greatly on the soil quality. We need to figure out exactly the kind of crops the soil is ideal for, the amount of seeds, fertilisers, irrigation needs, moisture level etc. The world is increasingly adopting technologies that greatly rely on soil quality.
Everything a soil needs can be figured out by advanced technology, and machines can assess whatever a crop needs at whatever time and the required quantity. This obviates the need for human intervention. A person can focus on tracking the work of the machine sitting at his/her home as all the data can be uploaded on the cloud.
In states likes Iowa and Illinois, the results of such experiments have been good, Gulati said. He said that in these states, in maize cultivation for instance, the yields are as high as 11 tonnes per hectare and this has been achieved with lesser irrigation, seed and fertilisers.
Can this be replicated in India? To answer this, Gulati called his fellow panelists from Israel to speak about their experiments here in collaboration with Rajasthan. Israel’s geography somewhat resembles that of Rajasthan’s as both states are semi-arid regions.
Dr Bergvinson, director general, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) was the first to put his views across on the matter. He rightly emphasised that instead of ‘per drop more crop’ the focus should shift to extracting more income. He listed the various challenges for Indian agriculture including the lack of diversified food system. Like Gulati, Bergivinson also batted for leveraging the power of cloud computing by adopting the method of ‘precision farming’. Underscoring the need for this shift, he said that due to climate change, uncertainties are increasing and this has made farming more unpredictable.
He told the audience about the experiment on precision farming carried out in Andhra Pradesh where those who used the technology saw their yields increase 22 per cent and those who didn’t, fall by 30 per cent. To make the shift towards more technology-based farming, he said that private public producer partnership is needed along with concerted efforts at the state level.
Martien Van Nieuwkoops of the World Bank said that agriculture is an important sector which can do wonders for the bank’s dream of eradicating poverty and increasing shared prosperity as the sector is one which can have a multiplier effect. But where will the agriculture growth come from?
He mentioned three sources:
1) Yield gaps: He said that this gap, which stands at about 50 per cent in India, needs to be closed.
2) He said that farmers need to shift from cereals to more economic crops or into dairy, fruits and vegetables. The current incentives are stacked in favour of cereal crops (high MSPs, favourable environment) but farmers must move to high value crops and diversification in farming is needed.
3) He also talked about post-harvest value addition, which includes steps like processing, grading, polishing etc. To underscore the importance of these steps, he informed that for every rupee of production, post-harvest value addition in India is also Rs 1. While the same in Europe and America is Rs 8/10 for every rupee. That means, there is a lot of potential for growth.
Yuval Fuchs, Deputy head of Israel’s MASHAV agency, said that poverty reduction remains a global goal, and not just India’s. He noted that 26 per cent of world poorest people live in India. However, he said that good news is that one of the largest number of poor have been lifted out of poverty in India.
Speaking on how Israel can help Rajasthan in doubling farm incomes, Yuval told the audience that though Rajasthan is a leader in milk production in India (which in turn is a global leader in milk production), a cow here gives 5 to 7 litres of milk on average but in Israel, this comes to around to 36 to 40 litres of milk! That’s five to six times more. Imagine if Rajasthan increases its productivity, he said.
Dan Alluf, a MASHAV counsellor, spoke of his experience of three excellence centres that MASHAV has been operating in cooperation with the Rajasthan government. He told that about 70 per cent of the water that Israel uses for agriculture is actually recycled water, which it is looking to increase to 90 per cent in future. He said that MASHAV understands that though conditions in India are quite different from Israel, the expertise they are bringing in can be successful, with the implementation being tailor made for India.
Dan spoke about three segments of value chain that MASHAV is focusing on at its excellence centres. These include: 1) Nursery management. Nurseries are high-tech and they provide high-quality seedlings to farmers which also generate income for the centres, making them self-reliant. 2) Cultivation and canopy management where the idea is to encourage intensification which leads to more crops, better pest control and in turn better incomes. 3) Better irrigation and fertigation.
Yuval and Dan also spoke during the second session of the day which centred around enchancing the Rajasthan-Israel partnership, where the Rajasthan Agriculture Minister Prabhu Lal Saini was also present. Saini thanked Yuval and Dan for being great friends of India and for Israel’s support. He then suggested that Israel also consider supporting Rajasthan farmers in productivity enhancement, improving shelf life of harvested crops, quality, shape and size improvement and increasing the nutritional value of food crops. He also called for cooperation in tackling pests diseases in crops such as Nimotode, YUM, and white fly problem.
In the first session, MukulVarshney, vice president of John Deere India, spoke on the increasing challenge of labour shortage which in turn has made it more expensive. Here comes the role of machines. He said that his company, a university, seed and fertiliser specialists formed a consortium and went to farmers and understood their problems, then convinced the government to frame favourable policies to help farmers. He said that they advised farmers how to grow crops, which machines to use, even which tractor of how much horsepower may be the right fit for them, etc. pneumatic machines helped farmers a lot. Every seed planted using the machine germinated with proper row spacing. The experiment conducted in Punjab for cotton crop resulted in increased yields anywhere between 35 to 65 per cent. Introduction of these machines for sowing and picking cotton obviated the need for labour. He informed that they are looking to scale the pilot projects in future.
Since farmers in India are small and marginal with little capital to spend on buying technology and equipment, he said, that the Rajasthan government has launched Custom Hiring Centres (CHCs). Through these centres, farmers can rent out farm equipment needed. They don’t need to spend money on buying these. By this, government is doing UBERISATION of the farm equipment.
Rajasthan plans to open over 2,600 hiring centres at the panchayat samiti level in the next three years to enable the state’s farmers to rent farming equipment, Chief Minister Raje had announced earlier during her speech.
Balraj Singh, vice-chancellor of Jodhpur Agricultural University, who was the last speaker of the first session stressed on improving soil health, enhancing organic matter, fertility, rainwater harvesting and making the judicious use of available water. He told that the reason why Rajasthan doesn’t see many suicides is because agriculture in the state is closely linked to animal husbandry, but he said that state needs to focus more on improving local breeds. He also called for promoting hybrid seed production and GI filling for crops like cumins, nagorimethi, gum, shahpuratenda etc, which Rajasthan is a pioneer in.
During the second session on the Rajasthan-Israel partnership, Nipun Sabrwal, head of operations at Top Greenhouses Ltd, was the last to speak. He focussed on adopting the best practices in the way we currently do agriculture. Instead of talking about vertical farming etc, he said Indian farmers first need to focus on doing horizontal farming right.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.