#dnaEdit: Changing agriculture

According to an assessment of United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), India will continue to face problems on the food front, but for different reasons in the next decade. One of them is that increase in food grains output, which was a prominent feature for the 2005-15 decade will be relatively less in the decade up to 2025. The reason is that a saturation point has been reached in terms of acreage as well as per hectare yields. It is also being said that the stress on demand for cereals will go down as the purchasing power of the majority of people will be on the rise and as a result the demand for the kind of food will diversify, moving from cereals to fruits and vegetables. But there is also the flip side to it. As the cereal output will have peaked, food inflation too will remain in place. This would affect a small section of people who would be dependent on cereals, but they would not have the purchasing power. This would require appropriate state intervention to avert a crisis.

Interestingly, this news comes at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on a five-nation visit to Africa. For more than a decade now, food planners in India have been toying with the idea of buying land in Africa for raising food crops for the country. As a matter of fact, chief minister of the then united Andhra Pradesh was seriously pursuing the plan of sending some of the Andhra farmers to Uganda for pursuing agriculture. The idea did not work out. It seems however that India would have to seriously envision a future scenario when the food needs of the country will have to be met in new and innovative ways.

There are two other alternatives proposed to fend off the extreme suggestion that India will have to look far afield to feed its people. The first is that there is much land that can be brought under agriculture by extending irrigation facilities. Indian agriculture is still crucially dependent on the monsoon, and it is felt that with the help of irrigation this dependence would be reduced. Secondly, as population growth stabilises and even witnesses a slight dip, the demand for food would also be so much less, and the country would be able to meet its own food demands. Both are plausible arguments. But the number of people who are willing to remain in the farm sector is rather precarious. Unless, large mechanised farms of the kind in others parts of the world like the United States, Australia and parts of Latin America are envisaged, it would be difficult to sustain an agricultural sector which is viable. But so far no one in the country has looked at agriculture in futurist terms. The attempt has been to save and preserve agriculture as we know it. 

There have been revolutionary changes in the industrial and services sectors, and there is also the potential of umpteen future shocks. Unfortunately, the same yardstick is not applied to agriculture. There is the feeling that agriculture somehow does not admit of radical revolutions and changes. It could be a mistake. Despite strident resistance to concepts like genetically modified (GM) crops today, it could possibly be the futurist trend. Though technologically-driven changes in industry and services sectors would define the future of societies, there can be no doubt that agriculture has a futurist potential, which will be vastly different from what it is today and what it has been in the last 10,000 years. It is time to think afresh about agriculture.