Table of Contents
It is a privilege to deliver a lecture in honour of Dr K R Narayanan, immediate Past President of India. Dr Narayanan represents all that is best in Indian culture and democratic system of governance. He rose from the lowest to the highest position in Indian Society by virtue of his innate human and professional qualities. Dr Narayanan knows the pangs of hunger and has therefore been on the forefront of the hunger free India movement. He encouraged scientists to work on problems relevant to the alleviation of poverty and eradication of hunger. I have therefore chosen the topic, ‘Science and Shaping our Agricultural Destiny’ for this lecture.
From the beginning of time, technology has been a key element in the growth and development of societies. The spread of technologies has however been uneven throughout history. In food production, we have now reached the age of biotechnology and precision farming. Many of the technologies like improved seeds are scale neutral with reference to their relevance to farms of varying sizes but are not resource neutral. Inputs are needed for output and hence those who do not have access to inputs tend to get bypassed by technological transformation. Synergy between technology and public policy has therefore remained a pre-condition for technologies to confer benefit to all sections of the farming community, irrespective of the size of their holdings and their innate capacity to mobilise capital and take risks. Among factors of production, access to irrigation water has been a major determinant of technological change, since without assured irrigation, it is difficult to apply nutrients in quantities essential for high yields, even if genetic strains capable of high productivity are available.
Today, global agriculture is witnessing two opposite trends. In many South Asian countries, farm size is becoming smaller and smaller and farmers suffer serious handicaps with reference to the cost-risk-return structure of agriculture. Farm size in most industrialised countries is becoming larger and larger and farmers are supported by heavy inputs of technology, capital and subsidy. The recent breakdown of the Cancun negotiations of the World Trade Agreement in the field of agriculture reflects the polarisation which has taken place in the basic agrarian structure of industrialised and developing countries.
In India, average yields of major food crops remained well below 1 metric ton per hectare for centuries, until the introduction of high yielding varieties in the 1960s. To produce one metric ton of rice the rice plant needs at least 20kgs of nitrogen and appropriate quantities of phosphorus, potash and micronutrients. The native soil fertility was often below this level and hence yields tended to remain below a ton.
The steps taken after independence to improve the productivity of food crops fall under the following major categories:
Improvement of agricultural production through the productivity pathway is essential for both resource poor farmers and consumers. Casual agricultural labourers are the largest in number among the chronically poor and cultivators the second largest group. Most of the chronically poor were either landless or near-landless. The smaller the farm, the greater is the need for increasing productivity, so that the farm family has a higher marketable surplus. Productivity improvement also tends to reduce the cost of the commodity, thereby benefiting resource poor consumers. Above all productivity improvement is essential for safeguarding the remaining forests, since otherwise forest land will get converted to produce food. Thus, the productivity pathway of agricultural advance helps in strengthening ecological, livelihood and food security.
What we need is an evergreen revolution, which can help to increase productivity in perpetuity without associated ecological harm (Swaminathan 1996). Exploitative agriculture offers great dangers if carried out with only an immediate profit or production motive. The initiation of exploitative agriculture without a proper understanding of the various consequences of every one of the changes introduced into traditional agriculture, and without first building up a proper scientific and training base to sustain it, may only lead us, in the long run, into an era of agricultural disaster rather than one of agricultural prosperity (Swaminathan 1968). We need ecotechnologies rooted in the principles of ecology, economics, gender and social equity and employment generation. The vulnerable sections need job-led economic growth and not jobless growth.
Inspite of striking agricultural progress and democratic decentralisation, chronic and transient poverty and poverty induced malnutrition are widespread. International and national media refer to this as the co-existence of ‘grain mountains and hungry millions’ (Swaminathan 2005). Section 2 outlines the issues in the context of food security and access, sections 3 and 4 the transition from the green to gene to evergreen revolution in rice and wheat, section 5 provides case studies that show how we can bridge the technological divide and section 6 concludes.