*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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- Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance (LEAF) Coalition, a collective of the United States, United Kingdom and Norway governments, came up with a $1 billion fund.
- LEAF is supported by transnational corporations (TNCs) like Unilever plc, Amazon.com, Inc, Nestle, Airbnb, Inc as well as Emergent, a US-based non-profit.
- The world lost more than 10 million hectares of primary tropical forest cover last year, an area roughly the size of Switzerland.
- Ending tropical and subtropical forest loss by 2030 is a crucial part of meeting global climate, biodiversity and sustainable development goals. Protecting tropical forests offers one of the biggest opportunities for climate action in the coming decade.
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- The LEAF coalition initiative is a step towards concretising the aims and objectives of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism.
- REDD+ was created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It monetised the value of carbon locked up in the tropical forests of most developing countries, thereby propelling these countries to help mitigate climate change.
- It is a unique initiative as it seeks to help developing countries in battling the double-edged sword of development versus ecological commitment.
- The initiative comes at a crucial time. The tropics have lost close to 12.2 million hectares (mha) of tree cover last year according to global estimates released by Global Forest Watch.
- Of this, a loss of 4.2 mha occurred within humid tropical primary forests alone. It should come as no surprise that most of these lost forests were located in the developing countries of Latin America, Africa and South Asia.
- Brazil has fared dismally on the parameter of ‘annual primary forest loss’ among all countries. It has lost 1.7 mha of primary forests that are rich storehouse of carbon. India’s estimated loss in 2020 stands at 20.8 kilo hectares.
- Between 2002-2020, Brazil’s total area of humid primary forest reduced by 7.7 per cent while India’s reduced by 3.4 per cent.
- Although the loss in India is not as drastic as in Brazil, its position is nevertheless precarious. For India, this loss is equivalent to 951 metric tonnes worth carbon dioxide emissions released in the atmosphere.
- It is important to draw comparisons between Brazil and India as both countries have adopted a rather lackadaisical attitude towards deforestation-induced climate change. The Brazilian government hardly did anything to control the massive fires that gutted the Amazon rainforest in 2019.
- It is mostly around May that forest fires peak in India. However, this year India, witnessed massive forest fires in early March in states like Odisha, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Mizoram among others.
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Context:-
At the recently concluded Leaders’ Summit on Climate in April 2021, Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance (LEAF) Coalition, a collective of the United States, United Kingdom and Norway governments, came up with a $1 billion fund plan that shall be offered to countries committed to arrest the decline of their tropical forests by 2030.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]What is LEAF Coalition?
Why LEAF Coalition?
Brazil & India
According to the UN-REDD programme, after the energy sector, deforestation accounts for massive carbon emissions — close to 11 per cent — in the atmosphere. Rapid urbanisation and commercialisation of forest produce are the main causes behind rampant deforestation across tropical forests.
Tribes, Forests and Government
Disregarding climate change as a valid excuse for the fires, Indian government officials were quick to lay the blame for deforestation on activities of forest dwellers and even labelled them “mischievous elements” and “unwanted elements”.
Policy makers around the world have emphasised the role of indigenous tribes and local communities in checking deforestation. These communities depend on forests for their survival as well as livelihood. Hence, they understand the need to protect forests. However, by posing legitimate environmental concerns as obstacles to real development, governments of developing countries swiftly avoid protection of forests and rights of forest dwellers.
For instance, the Government of India has not been forthcoming in recognising the socio-economic, civil, political or even cultural rights of forest dwellers. According to data from the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs in December, 2020 over 55 per cent of this population has still not been granted either individual or community ownership of their lands.
To make matters worse, the government has undertaken systematic and sustained measures to render the landmark Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 ineffective in its implementation. The Act had sought to legitimise claims of forest dwellers on occupied forest land.
Various government decisions have seriously undermined the position of indigenous people within India. These include proposing amendments to the obsolete Indian Forest Act, 1927 that give forest officials the power to take away forest dwellers’ rights and to even use firearms with impunity.
There is also the Supreme Court’s order of February, 2019 directing state governments to evict illegal encroachers of forest land or millions of forest dwellers inhabiting forests since generations as a measure to conserve wildlife. Finally, there is the lack of data on novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) deaths among the forest dwelling population;
Tardy administration, insufficient supervision, apathetic attitude and a lack of political intent defeat the cause of forest dwelling populations in India, thereby directly affecting efforts at arresting deforestation.
Way Forward
Tuntiak Katan, a global indigenous leader from Ecuador and general coordinator of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, aptly indicated the next steps at the Climate Summit:
“The first step is recognition of land rights. The second step is the recognition of the contributions of local communities and indigenous communities, meaning the contributions of indigenous peoples.We also need recognition of traditional knowledge practices in order to fight climate change”
Perhaps India can begin by taking the first step.