Our Farm Income And Nutritional Challenge Amid Climate Change

Context: Embracing sustainable agriculture improves farm incomes and nutrition security in a climate-changing world.

Issues faced by Indian farmers

• Increasing vulnerability to climate change: India is one of the most vulnerable. Higher ambient temperatures, less predictable rains, frequent droughts and cyclones will only worsen in the years ahead.
• Marginal Impact of Green revolution in rain fed area, which accounts 60% of Indian farmers. Rain-fed farmers practise low-resource agriculture, have low productivity.
• Slowest income growth in agriculture among all sectors of India’s economy.
• Increase in Input Cost: In irrigated areas, a typical farmer now uses 3.5 times more fertilizer than in 1970 to get the same output.
  • As much as 78% of this fertilizer is lost to the environment, causing soil, air and water pollution.
• Nutritional Challenges: Input-intensive agriculture has made us calorie-secure, about 22% of adults are underweight and 38% and 59% of children under the age of five are stunted and anaemic.
• Lack of adoption and policy support for sustainable agriculture: that limits the mainstreaming of sustainable agriculture
  • SAP adaptation at low 4% of farmers.
  • India’s National Mission on Sustainable Agriculture receives only 0.8% of the agricultural budget of Rs 1.42 trillion.

Policy response to vulnerabilities in agriculture

• Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) report identified economically remunerative, socially inclusive and environmentally benign 16 sustainable agriculture practices (SAPs), such as
  • Organic farming, natural farming, integrated farming systems, agroforestry and precision farming.
• A few states are already at the vanguard of this revolution like
  • Sikkim is a 100% organic state, and Andhra Pradesh aims at 100% natural farming by 2027.
• Practices towards climate resilient agriculture: Like naturally-farmed paddy and banana fields withstood heavy cyclones in Andhra Pradesh, whereas adjoining fields with conventionally harvested crops were devastated.

Way forward: Promoting sustainable agriculture Practices through

• Knowledge exchange and capacity building: Many of these practices are knowledge- and skill-intensive. Farmers need handholding in the early phases.
  • Government must leverage the presence of more than 1,000 civil society organizations for promoting farmer-to-farmer capacity building for sustainable agriculture.
• Technology innovation and adoption to mechanize labour-intensive activities associated with SAPs through
  • Atal Innovation Mission to Incentivize innovators and entrepreneurs to encourage the development of farm implements for SAPs.
  • Support local micro-businesses through state livelihood missions to produce and sell ready-made inputs such as vermicompost and organic fertilizers.
• Restructure government support to agriculture through effective farmer engagement and transition support for short-term losers.
  • Incentivize outcomes such as annual nutrition output per hectare and enhanced ecosystem services such as water conserved or desertification reversed.
  • Outcome-based support could encourage innovation among farmers and allow the adoption of alternative approaches, including SAPs.
• Enhance research and development support for impact studies comparing these with conventional farming across agro-climatic zones as
  • Focusing on landscape-level long-term impact studies could inform further scale-ups of SAPs even in irrigated areas.
• Broaden the national policy focus from food to nutrition security, looking beyond yields and measuring annual nutrition output per hectare.