2. An agricultural giant incapable of ensuring the food security of its own
population!!
Small scale problems:
• Population pressure
• Small holdings
• Lack of poor storage facility
• Depleted soils
• Inadequate irrigation facilities
• Farm implements
Agricultural sector in india faces 3 major problems:
• Nearly three-quarters of India’s families depend on rural incomes.
• The majority of India’s poor (some 770 million people or about 70 percent) are found in rural
areas.
• India’s food security depends on producing cereal crops, as well as increasing its production of
fruits, vegetables and milk to meet the demands of a growing population with rising incomes.
4. Acc. to IFPRI inspite of green revolution the investment in subsidies in have
become subject to far reaching concerns in india due to following:
• They have outlive their original purpose of stimulating input use.
• The benefit large scale farmers as compared to small-holders.
• They are fiscal burden on state
• They may have negative environmental implications.
UNEXPECTED WEATHER(a major cause):
• Farmers face many stressful uncertainties by the nature of their work and
their lack of access to insurance and to finances at reasonable interest rates.
• The Indian monsoon is often unpredictable, and unexpected weather—such
as long periods of drought—can cause crop failures, drastically reducing the
farmers’ income.
• Environmental experts expect climate shocks to become more frequent in
the future as a result of global warming and shifts in climatic zones.
5. Failure of Green Revolution:
• The cropping patterns of the Green Revolution, based on repeated planting of soil
depleting crops like rice and wheat, led to erosion and degradation of land.
• The influx of genetically modified seeds for monocultures made farmers reliant on
agrichemical and seed corporations and destroyed genetic diversity, making crops
much more vulnerable to new pests and diseases .
• The supposedly “high yielding varieties” of seeds required far more inputs than the
traditional varieties, and farmers went into debt to buy these seeds and the
fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation water to support them.
• The intensive application of chemicals resulted in soil toxicity in much of India,
threatening the health of plants, animals, and humans.
• Today, there is a crisis in groundwater due to depletion from heavy irrigation, and
farmers are driven further into debt to install increasingly powerful and expensive
pumps to utilize this water.
• Many Indian agricultural experts find agriculture to be unsustainable and
unprofitable, and some predict a rapid decline in agricultural output in the future.
6. Low level productivity
Low agricultural productivity is a problem at two levels in India:
• national level
• the level of individual farmers and their families.
At the national level, India has a population that needs 210 million tons of grain, but
India produces only 200 million tons (Agoramoorthy, 2008).
At the individual level, the extremely small size of Indian landholdings restricts total
output. The small size of Indian farm plots may also be a cause for inefficiency
India has recently put bans on exports of rice, wheat, and corn to help ensure
domestic food security and stable prices, but this strategy does not resolve the issue
that population growth is continuing to outpace growth in agricultural productivity
India found that chemical fertilizer recommendations for planting are based on
outdated soil surveys.
7. MSP Policy:
• Minimum support prices (MSPs), buffer stocks, and the public
distribution system (PDS) are the basis of India’s food security and
pricing system.
• In recent years, the Indian government has steadily and significantly
increased MSPs for certain crops to counter claims of MSPs too low
to support farmers, as well as to satisfy the demands of more
powerful farmers and regions.
• The World Bank reported in 2005 that benefits accrued to large
farmers as a result of the MSPs were 13 times larger than those to a
marginal farmer in the same state and 95% of procurement of wheat,
for which there was a high MSP, occurred in only three states (World
Bank, 2005).
• Worse than these inequities is that the government has sometimes
been unwilling to support its announced MSP, failing to purchase at
this price from farmers seeking to sell to them for lack of a better
price elsewhere
8. Impedations to domestaic sales and exports:
• Two major impediments to domestic sales and exports are
1) Food safety risks.
2) Lack of infrastructure for processing.
• India’s national market is giving increasing value to the quality and safety of foods,
and despite India’s tremendous share of global food production, India contributes
only 1.5% of exports of processed food (Singh, 2008; Kumar, 2008)
• Post-harvest losses are 25 to 30% (Kumar, 2008).
9. Agricultural
and food
policyEnvironmental
policy
Energy policy
Economic policy
• Fertilizer policies
• Policies on electricity and
supply of ground water
• Policies to maintain soil fertility
• Policies for irrigation and water
management
Policy fields related to fertilizer subsidy and electricity
supply to agriculture
As we can see here
since 2008, the
intersection of
agriculture to
environment policy
and agro to
environment to
energy policy is
very low which has
caused subsequent
decrease in
production.
10. SOLUTIONS
• Promoting institutional land holdings instead of individual or joint holding so
as to have a systematic approach.
• Gov. should target small scale small holder farms while providing subsidies if
institutional farming fails
• Utilising waste lands for house hold purposes for construction. For ex: in
agriculture census of 2010-2011 GOV. of RAJASTHAN distributed wastelands
for house hold purposes so as to utilise agricultural land for actual use.
• Getting in touch with institutions like INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY
RESEARCH INSTITUTE(IFPRI) which aims at making policies for food needs in
developing countries.
• Subsidize the fundamental nutrient ,nitrogen ,rather than compounds such as
urea.
• A SUSTAINABLE GREEN REVOLUTION IN ORGANIC FARMING by using new
techniques in a way the strengthens ecological systems and preserves natural
resources
11. • Skill development training programs and efforts to ensure that all needed
inputs are available to farmers.
• DEVELOPMENT and EXPANSION OF FOOD PROCESSING FACILITIES : which
would help diversify and commercialize agriculture by :
1) extending product shelf-life,
2) adding value to produce,
3) increasing farmers’ income
4) generation of employment and foreign exchange
earnings for India.
• The methodology for arriving at the MSP should undergo periodic,
transparent, and thorough review by both academicians and farm leaders
to eliminate large differences across crops for the value of the MSP in
comparison to the market price.
• CREATING AWARENESS among people so that can access various
implicatons made by GOV. of INDIA in favour of farmers.
12. References:
• www.google.in
• WHO OFFICIAL SITE
• REPORT BY AGRICULTURE CENSUS OF INDIA
• U.N. AGRICULTURE REPORT
• IFPRI ANNUAL REPORT
