Back to Earth
The obsession with high yields will have to be tempered if India is to save its small and marginal farmers
Over dependence on high yielding varierties could spell doom for small farmers
FARMERS ARE up in arms yet again. They are angry about the government’s apathy to their chronic distress, which has forced over 300,000 farmers to end their lives in the last two decades. The reasons for the crisis are varied but the bottom line is that stagnant prices and rising input costs have resulted in soul-crushing debts. As usual, the state’s response has been typical: plain denial followed by cries of political conspiracy, then high-handedness, and finally appeasement by way of waiving public debt (which leaves millions of small farmers reeling under private debt).
This is also the time for pundits to offer all-too-familiar commentaries on what’s ailing Indian agriculture. Notable among the usual suspects: fragmentation of land holdings, volatile markets driven by neo-liberal policies, lack of assured irrigation, lack of good siloes, rising costs of inputs such as seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and farm equipment, and not to mention erratic monsoons.
All of the foregoing may explain bits of the big picture, but the roots of the crisis go deeper. We are all taught in school how India’s Green Revolution pulled it out of an imminent food crisis. This new farming model was based on scientific inputs, such as high-yielding varieties, fertilisers, pesticides and mechanised harvesting. To be sure, the yields did go up, but so did the production costs. As most farmers were poor, the state not only subsidised the input costs but also bought bulk of the produce at an assured minimum price, even if it militated against the logic of demand and supply. The goal of food security trumped every other concern.
However, as India liberalised in the 1990s, state warranties against crop or market failure became increasingly thin and uncertain, leaving the poor farmer at the mercy of a precarious market. But governments, intent on food security, kept harping on higher yields. So while a bumper crop was good news for the state, for farmers it was a triple whammy of stagnating minimum support prices, rising input costs, and lower market value.
Turns out a bumper crop is not only bad economics but bad ecology as well. Rick Haney, a researcher at the US Department of Agriculture, has shown that soils subjected to deep ploughing and a heavy dose of chemicals lose their fertility over time. In order to extract high yields year after year, they have to be laced with increasing doses of fertilisers and pesticides, which in turn implies higher input costs and thinner profit margins.
Haney is not alone in his critique of modern farming. In his recent book Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, David Montgomery, professor of earth sciences at Seattle’s Washington University, attempts to debunk a couple of deeply entrenched myths about modern farming. Firstly, contrary to popular opinion, large farms are not global food baskets. According to a 2014 Food and Agriculture Organization report, small farms of one hectare size produce over three-quarters of global food.
Two, large, modern farms are not necessarily more efficient than small, usually organic farms. He quotes several studies to back his claim. For instance, according to a 1992 US agriculture census report, small farm yields per acre (0.4 ha) are almost twice that of the large ones. A 1989 US National Research Council report on alternative agriculture found that wellrun alternative farms use less chemicals per unit of production than modern farms. Finally, a 2014 meta-analysis of 115 studies published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that the difference between the two farm types was no more than 20 per cent. The difference narrowed where crops were rotated and cover crops planted.
But Montgomery’s main prayer echoes that of Haney’s: the only way to save the ordinary farmer is to get off the treadmill of ever-greater productivity. As Haney told the website yale360.com, the world should switch from “let’s kill everything and grow what we want,” to “let’s grow a lot of different things to help grow what we want more efficiently”. Perhaps, our politicians should try this down-to-earth recipe for a change instead of resorting just to loan waivers.