Times Agricultural Journal

The rising population has kept the necessity of producing more food ever growing. In 1998, Dr. Edger J. DaSilva, Director, Life Sciences Section, UNESCO, had said that the world population, then approximately 5.8 billion, is expected to double by the year 2050 and that the challenge for the future lies in global food security that necessitates a doubling of food production in the next 50 years to meet the needs of the population.

Can we be content with maintaining the present levels of food production? Even if we add to richness/wealth in all other terms, the population will be confronted with options of either to keep stomach half empty every day, assuming we achieve equitable distribution by 2050, or to wage food wars.

Green Revolution - Past, Present And Future

The Green Revolution has itself declined. In almost all crops, yields have been stagnating over the last decade. The same yield response to irrigation and fertilizers is not being achieved by the same improved genotypes in the same fields.
There is no possibility of better hybrids through further breeding. The natural gene pool has been almost fully utilized and yield improvement by new hybrids over already existing is only marginal at best.
This marginal improvement obtained in research stations is not reproducing itself in farmers’ fields. Although average yields did improve to some extent, major increase in food production is through increase in area under cultivation rather than by increase in per acre yields.
The achieved average yields are far less from the maximum yield potential. There is hardly any potential for further increase in area under irrigation/cultivation.
On the contrary, due to faulty irrigation and fertilizer use, the fertility of irrigated and intensively cultivated lands has declined sharply and these areas are likely to go out of cultivation in the near future. In some areas in Maharashtra, for example, thousands of hectares of once highly fertile agricultural lands, with plenty of river water for irrigation, have turned into vast tracts of saline and water logged soils. Finding their reclamation unfeasible, some farmers have already turned their farms, once under sugarcane, to freshwater fish farming.
The Green Revolution has brought a whole range of pests and diseases and the need for heavy dependence on agrochemicals. Weeds are also perceived as an equally intractable problem. The need for agrochemicals has risen sharply, pushing up capital requirements and the cost of production, which has eaten into the net profit margin, making farming financially unattractive.
Genetically Modified crops are technology’s answer to these problems as well as the problems of salinity resistance, drought resistance and resistance to may diseases. However, many environmental issues are being raised in the cultivation of these crops. There are reports that in USA, where farmers have adopted GM crops during the last few years on a very large scale, while there has been success in combating insects and weeds, they are failing to achieve satisfactory yields.
In non-GM crops, heavy use of agrochemicals has resulted in toxic or carcinogenic residues in food, raising a scare about their consumption.
On a whole, the farmers are dissatisfied. This has led to farmers’ agitations. Many farmers have turned their back on the use of fertilizers and chemicals in agriculture, basically to the concept of intensive agriculture, under various banners such as natural farming, organic farming etc. Some claim success, but most end up accepting sharp yield reductions per acre, with the only solace that they did not incur any capital expenditure.
On the GM crops front too, assuming that they turn out to be environmentally safe, the question of the limitations of this technology, remain. Most of the genes controlling yield are polygenic, and a technology for such a change is not in sight at present. Resistance to insects, pests and diseases per se are not guaranteed to boost per acre yield. Further, licensing their production after a whole range of tests and the job of convincing customer to accepting products from it is going to be a long drawn out one.

The situation can be averted only through R&D by people’s participation, not for low input agriculture alone, but for all types of agriculture. Basically, R&D as a concept and activity should not remain separated from agriculture per se but become synonymous with it.

Given the complexity of agriculture and the increasingly specialized ways of farming under biotechnology, achieving practically possible maximum yield is no more within the scope of single individuals. It is possible only if the small farmer retains the ownership and his farming becomes a team effort involving practical and fair partnership with financier, corporates and a team of expert scientists helping him in adaptive R&D to assimilate the formal R&D product chosen by him. The government, on its part should pass facilitating legislations wherever imparting legal validity to the underlying relationships in above team effort is required.

To understand the importance of R&D by people’s participation, it is necessary to first understand where we stand today in terms of productivity and the effects of the Green Revolution. This is highlighted in the box: Green Revolution - Past, present and future.

It is high time researchers woke up to the fact that due to the application of formal research results of the Green Revolution, without intervention of adaptive R&D to the soil conditions, integrated nutrition and disease and pest management, etc., a host of problems have emerged. Farmers at the centre stage of the Green Revolution, far from having benefited, are in fact irreversibly saddled with several disadvantages, a legacy of the era of Green Revolution. However, the technology is not at fault, but its implementation without caring for locally adaptive R&D.

The Genesis

The concept of R&D through people’s participation in agricultural technology development emerged in the late 1980s. It gathered momentum due to the growing resentment amongst that large proportion of farmers engaged in “low input agriculture” whose susceptibilities and requirements were totally ignored by the initial boom of agricultural technology developments, which was perceived to have immensely benefited only the “high external input” Green Revolution.