Adopt responsible agriculture to manage natural resources

The Indian Constitution mandates, as per Article 51 (A) (g), that all citizens of the country are duty bound to ensure that natural resources are judiciously used so that sustainable development can take place in all sectors, including agriculture. This can be scientifically achieved by adopting responsible agriculture and to ensure this every stakeholder should use natural resources in a responsible manner in the entire chain of agriculture production from farm to fork.

To achieve the 'Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs), the “Agri-value Chain” (AVC) has to be managed in a responsible manner for which all stakeholders — from policy framers to farmers — should adopt and promote responsible agriculture.

First, let’s understand the word ‘value chain before we deliberate it. A value chain is defined as the whole series of activities that create and build value at every step.

Similarly, ‘sustainability’ infers review of all the aspects of productivity, i.e. maximise output with minimal waste of input resources, including energy, water, fertilizers, etc. It also means judicious use of resources or “producing more out of less” or gets more crop per drop, reduce chemicals and how to bring solar power into agriculture or to reuse the ensuing waste.

Though most agriculturists are aware of all these aspects as it is intrinsic to agri-business but it needs constant optimisation. The ongoing programmes of the governments cover the optimizing aspects, which are regularly scaled-up depending on available resources.

Then what is the change perspective? It would be apt to highlight the largely ignored aspect in the rush to produce more.

We utilised all means to ramp up our production and measured productivity as production per unit of land or livestock, output against unit input.

The production from our farms; be it food grains or fruits, sugarcane, vegetables, milk and meats was commonly viewed as an achievement in itself. But why do we produce more food? The end objective is to ensure that more food reaches the end consumers!

The production from our farms was commonly viewed as an achievement and it was fine while farms produced for local consumers who were within reach, however, when production increased even more, farming became non-sustainable because more was produced than could be absorbed locally and market access was found missing. Today, productivity in itself cannot be seen as successful science experiment, where success is measured merely at the farm-level productivity because now it is a commercial activity. More needs to be done to bring value to producers and that value can be realised only by making available more of the produce to the end consumers.

Let’s analyse the other dimension of the production system, the food loss which is the first signal to watch out. We reportedly incur food loss averaging from 20% to 40% of the food produced and thereby, we are amaking agriculture non-sustainable.

In the list of actions that can be taken to make agriculture and associated businesses responsible, we need to fine tune our priorities. The first priority should be to improve the production delivery management.

The second priority should be to manage the root cause of the production process including management of soil in sustainable manner. Without fertile soil, we have no food in the long run. To buttress the point is the solar pumps for irrigation.

Solar pumps work when the sun is high and intense. However, plants benefit more from watering before sunrise or after sunset. Further, highly subsidised solar pumps may cause indiscriminate usage leading to wastage and depletion of water table.

What free energy to run tube wells has done to the soil in few northern states in the country is well known.

The central government is cognizant of the repercussions of food loss and has specific interventions to strengthen agriculture through developing better market linkages.

Therefore, our focus should be on handling; what we produce better and also manage change perceptions so as to measure in terms of “gainful productivity” or “production delivered”. Reducing food loss has direct and immediate impact of reducing resource wastage. This will infuse longevity and value into agriculture.

In the ultimate analysis, the key to achieve all SDG targets is the development of efficient delivery management systems for our agricultural produce. This means efficient supply chains that will take food to people far and wide, reduce hunger, generate income to farmers, balance inflation, make production sustainable and feed economic growth.

We must not forget that as global citizens, we all need to take up mitigating food loss on a war footing to ensure food to every mouth.