Challenges like climate change call for farm research to take centre stage, just like during the Green Revolution

Introduction

Recently, the Prime Minister has launched 35 different crop varieties with special traits. These Crop Varieties have been developed by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) to address the twin challenges of climate change and malnutrition.

These include a new herbicide-tolerant rice variety, a drought-tolerant variety of chickpea, an early maturing variety of soybean, biofortified varieties of wheat, pearl millet, etc.

What is the need for these crops?

Indian agriculture’s major challenge in the initial decades after Independence was to increase crop production and yields at any cost. Today, it’s about boosting farm incomes, while simultaneously ensuring production that is cost-competitive, resource-use efficient and climate-smart.

What are the challenges India faced during Green Revolution?

The first challenge that India confronted, of feeding its population and achieving a modicum of grain self-sufficiency. But India overcame these challenges by using high-yielding semi-dwarf varieties bred during the 1960s and 1970s.

What are the present challenges of Indian Agriculture?

Climate change is impacting Indian Agriculture in unforeseeable ways. For example, average temperatures are rising, winters are getting shorter and the number of rainy days is falling even with overall “normal” monsoons.

Apart from that, extreme hot and cold or prolonged dry weather and intense downpours make growing crops and rearing animals difficult.

Farmers also facing problems of depleting water tables, soaring energy costs and the emergence of new pests and diseases.

How India can overcome these challenges?

Research on new breeding approaches: India requires new breeding approaches, including gene modification and editing technologies. India also should invest in low-input, high-output agriculture technologies.

This is significant as research may not yield political dividends or pay in the short run like subsidies. But the returns from farm research are more sustainable. For instance, Today, IARI varieties alone account for over 95 percent of India’s Rs 32,000-crore annual basmati rice exports and nearly half of India’s total wheat area.

Rely on generalists: Agriculture and climate change are too important to be left only to generalist bureaucrats, economists and activists.

Source: This post is based on the article “Challenges like climate change call for farm research to take centre stage, just like during the Green Revolution” published in Indian Express on 30^th Sep 2021.