Reigniting Agri Production
The Indian economy grew at 7.6 per cent in the July to September quarter. It was little less than 7.8 per cent in the first quarter (Q1), but more compared to 6.2 per cent in the second quarter of the previous fiscal year. It was also higher than the Reserve Bank’s projection of 6.5 per cent.
However, not so good news is from the agriculture sector for the same period. Its Gross Value Added (GVA) growth contracted to 1.2 per cent from 3.5 per cent in Q1. In the service sector, the drop from 9.2 per cent in Q1 to 4.3 per cent in Q2. While looking at the Agriculture GVA it is necessary to remember that when all economic indicators showed sharply downward trends at the peak of COVID-19, agriculture provided much-needed solace to the economy. It grew at 3.4 per cent against the negative growth of all other economic sectors and the contraction of Q1 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for 2020-21 by 23.9 per cent. Agriculture proved to be the real backbone of our economy then.
Agriculture GVA is contracted in a situation where the country is already facing rising food prices. This resulted in the government banning exports of non-basmati rice in July, wheat in
May and sugar in October to maintain stocks and stop prices from rising. In September, the government further banned the export of broken rice and imposed a 20 per cent export duty on non-basmati rice considering the previous year’s production and this year’s estimates.
The US Agriculture Department forecasted a 4 per cent decrease in paddy production. As per the Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare Ministry estimate, the expected fall in production will be a 3.7 per cent decrease. Almost a dry spell in several parts of the country during monsoon in the entire month of August has affected crop production. That could be one of the reasons for low GVA. Later, unseasonal rains further affected the prospects of good crops. As a result, It is estimated that rice production will decrease from 136 million tonnes last year to 132 million tonnes this year. It is a matter of utmost concern since the production has fallen despite the area under cultivation increasing by over 6 lakh hectares.
All these factors have combined to bring down the country’s total food reserve to lowest in the past six years. At the same time, the government is committed to providing free food grains to over 80 crore poor families. This could pose a challenge for the government to maintain adequate reserves.
In a recent comprehensive assessment, out of over 800 districts of the country, 310 districts have been identified as the most vulnerable to unpredictable weather events. Of these, 109 are in the very highly vulnerable category and
201 are in the highly vulnerable category. This categorisation has been carried out under the National Innovations on Climate Resilient Agriculture, an initiative to fortify agriculture against extreme weather impact.
Given this scenario, there is a need to find out how the adverse effects can be avoided, or at least minimised, so that storage would not get affected. Maybe changing crop patterns could be one way. But that would not be possible to do on a very large scale in case of staple food crops like rice, wheat, etc, which are grown in massive acreages. Maybe finding our climate change resilient new varieties of these food grains could be one way to mitigate the adverse outcomes.
The Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) has already made good headway in that direction. It has developed 1971 climate resilient crop varieties since 2014. Of them, 429 are tolerant to biotic stress and 1542 resistant to abiotic stressors. They need to take to the farmers and popularise them. As a country with a large, growing population, we cannot afford to keep our main agriculture production plummeting and endanger our food security.