Stagnation in agricultural investment costing India dearly

A lack of funding in agriculture in India for the past two decades is costing India dearly as it struggles to feed itself from year to year, a New York Times article said.

 

India did not suffer from lack of arable land nor the means to achieve food self-sufficiency, the article pointed out - India has the world's second largest area of arable land, next to America. The country is also known for its innovation in various fields.

 

In fact, during the last Green Revolution (between 1968-1988), India's grains production more than doubled through the use of better rice and wheat varieties developed by Indian scientists.

 

But for the past two years, it has been importing wheat to feed its population - seven million tonnes in the last two years.

 

The country now also depends on the global markets for half its edible oil.

 

The problem with wheat was not that India could not grow enough but the minimum prices offered by the government was too low, the article pointed out.

 

It was not until the government raised prices that the government's wheat buffer stocks went up and officials declared that India would not be need to import wheat this year.

 

The problem Indian faces was a lack of investment funding into agriculture; since the 1980s, the government has not expanded irrigation and access to loans for farmers, or to advance agricultural research.

 

The result was that the achievements made during the first green revolution, started forty years ago to eliminate hunger and famine in India, were laid to waste.

 

A cornerstone of the Green Revolution- turning India from a single cropping nation to one of double cropping, fell into neglect as years passed. Double cropping in India was made possible through irrigation. Instead of relying solely on the single monsoon yearly to supply their crops, farmers were able to create another "monsoon" through irrigation during the Green Revolution.

 

Government funding for river irrigation dried off after the first green revolution. The result was that today, only about 40 percent of India's farms are irrigated.

 

Higher inflation has brought the prices of agricultural inputs soaring to the extent that farmers now find it more profitable to sell ancestral lands to developers than continue planting crops themselves, the article said.

 

A long and inefficient supply chain means that the average farmer receives less than a fifth of the price the consumer pays, according to  a World Bank study, far less than farmers in other countries.

 

Increasingly market-savvy, those farmers who stayed on the land are turning to cash crops for their incomes, the report noted.