Orissa has prepared an agriculture plan where crop loans exceed total value of estimated total yield. This kind of an approach has gone to the making of the Draft Climate Change Action Plan. The plan does precious little to save agriculture from threats, including those from climate change.
Bimal Prasad Pandia
Orissa faces a bland situation with regard to agriculture – the sector that provides livelihoods to more than three-fourth of its population. All this has been the outcome of a one-dimensional approach – i.e. of increasing production - that the government is following since the ‘green revolution’. The idea has been to boost production significantly. For that a significant reliance has been put on sharp increase is use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides; hybrid/high-yielding varieties of seeds; very heavy influx of money supply through loans; and use of modern gadgets and implements. While these have increased cost of production and dependence on external sources/resources many-folds, the expected surge in production has hardly materialized. Production has hit a plateau and has become more unstable than ever before. The stated increase in irrigation potential, too, has not helped in stemming large-scale production fluctuations. Climate change – with its inherent risk and unpredictability factors – is adding woes to the injuries. The end result is that with decreasing profit, farming is becoming an un-enviable business. People are shying away from farming. Farm sector is losing social standing. This is a big threat as we people can hardly survive growing disinterest among farmers towards farming. Who can live without food? But the government’s approaches hardly look the challenge that way. Rather it is leading towards a grave danger of food insecurity.
Thankfully, some of the plans that the government had made earlier did not materialize the way they expected those to be. Orissa’s first agriculture policy came in 1996. It had aimed to increase per-hectare fertiliser consumption from 50 kg. in year 1996-97 to 100 kg. in 2001-02. Twelve years after that agriculture policy, another agriculture policy came in the year 2008. The new agriculture policy of 2008 still complained of the state using very less fertiliser, i.e., ’53 kg/hectare’. The second agriculture policy again tries to increase per-hectare fertiliser application to 100 kg in the ‘next five years’. Thankfully, our farmers have not followed the wish of the government and per hectare fertiliser application still stayed at 58 kg per hectare in the year 2009. However, Orissa has not been that lucky with regard to use of pesticides. This time luck has favoured the pesticides manufacturers and traders at the cost of the farmers. Though specific information on increase in pesticides application is not available, its growing presence can be easily felt.
As the cost of production keeps on piling, the government does its best to pump in more credits more loans and make the farmer’s debt burden increasingly heavier. And it is making the burden so heavier that a farmer can never ever be able to recover from that. Government’s plan for the present agricultural seasons is nothing but a Pandora’s Box. This year Government has plans to disburse, as quoted by the Financial Express on its 3rd June 2010 edition, 9,165 Crore rupees as loans to farmers. That means average per-hectare loan amount comes to a hefty 15,672 rupees. This is for the kharif crops only, other long term and outstanding loan burdens still remain with the farmers. With this heavy loan infusion, our government aims to produce 73.58 lakh tones of food grains, an increase of about 2 lakh tones from last year. Its focus stays on that ‘increase’ in production only and does not go beyond that. Hardly has any thought gone into whether the plan will make the farmers richer or reduce their debt burden. Ironically, the plan is going to end in ruining the farmers further. Assuming that the state achieves the production target and one kilogram of food grain fetches 10 rupees to the farmer, total value of expected food-grain production this year will amount to 7,358 Crore rupees only. That means the value of total food grain produced in the state will fall well short of the loans taken by the farmers. That means even if farmers sell all their products, still they will be able to meet only 80 percent of the basic loan – excluding interest - that they will take this year. In such a situation where entire production fails to compensate the base loan, rate of interest for agricultural loans hardly comes into account. Has any thought gone to this? When the total produce of farmers fails to recover even the short-term crop loan amount, what will be there profit and how will they sustain their livelihoods??
Ironically, our government and a majority of modern agricultural scientists and ruefully some of our farmers, whom the government categorizes as lead farmers, do believe in this kind of a farming system. No thought goes to the profitability and sustainability aspect of farming. More money is pumped into the system, more fertiliser applied, more expensive practice adopted. Sometimes production increases, but often not. Even when production increases still that falls short of expenditure. An invariably it degrades bearing quality of land, our mother earth.
As we face one disaster after the other, the calculations go haywire and farmers’ miseries keep piling. It’s a chaos….!!! We have to get rid of this… and quite quickly at that.
Scope for correction was there in the Climate Change Action plan, BUT…
Agriculture is considered as the most vulnerable sector vis-à-vis climate change. Any change in rain, wind, temperature and local atmosphere will have an effect, mostly in negative, on the agriculture sector. And since a lot many families depend on this sector they become vulnerable to vagaries of climate change. Not only this, we can live without our luxuries but not food. And hence food supply mechanism has to be dealt with quite carefully.
Thus, when the state government thought of a climate change action plan, status and threats over the agriculture sector should have been thoroughly assessed and measures should have been planned. But the ‘priority activities’ as proposed in the draft Odisha Climate Change Action Plan (OCCAP) have hardly taken any consideration of that. Rather, it again focuses to flush in more money and thereby make farming more expensive, more dependent on external resources. The whole exercise brushes aside the chief malaise in the system, i.e. to stop increase in farmer’s dependence on external factors. It only focuses on bringing more aids, more loans!
Agriculture, one out of 11 thematic sectors that the draft OCCAP covers, has shortlisted 10 ‘key priorities’. The only priority which is perhaps closer to the objective of reducing external dependence is the priority number eight. That priority talks of ‘developing sustainable soil, water and crop management practices’. But, the estimated budget for that activity is only 2.5 Crore… only 50 lakh rupees per year. On the contrary, the OCCAP gives topmost priority to ‘rapid screening and strategy assessment of state agriculture policy in the context of climate change’. A policy which has been formulated barely two years ago requires to be revisited and for that our government requires 143 Crores? To some extent we can agree on revisiting the 2008 agriculture policy as the only reference that policy gives to climate change is limited to the following sentence under the ‘risk management head’… “the emerging issue of impact of climate change on agriculture would be addressed by taking proactive measures and developing effective strategies for each agro-climatic zone to reduce the vulnerability to climate change”. But, why it requires 143 Crore rupees? With this amount, it proposes to use, ‘empirical weather data to provide the bottoms-up perspective’. It hopes, ‘that will lead to substantiate the possible climate scenarios for Orissa… This will lead to identifying modifications that will be required to cope with climate change’. Oh my goodness… then the ‘rapid screening of agriculture policy’ will not show us the better way of farming and lead us towards that? It will just come out with a weather projection model??
Similarly, the second priority of the OCCAP is ‘establishing institutional delivery mechanisms to promote best practices on climate change adaptation’. For this it requires 100 Crore rupees. Its sheer madness… we do not yet know what it terms as ‘best practices’. The OCCAP hopes that through this activity ‘farmers will be able to make more informed decisions with the information that reaches’ through ‘the cluster-level climate change resource centers. It does not explain what it means by ‘best practices’. Going by the current trend, if ‘best practices’ mean more chemical fertiliser and more pesticides etc, then we are surely in for a far more horrible era. These two top priorities, laid out in the OCCAP for agriculture sector, give an indication of how lazily and carelessly our government is taking our agriculture in the face of climate change.
It has not taken into account issues of large-scale land degradation of soil, productivity decline, growing mono-cropping of paddy, lesser diversification of crops, more sub-leasing of land and moreover immediate and sustaining distress among farmers arising out of climate change.
What should the OCCAP focus on?
Making our agriculture less susceptible to climate change does not require any technical and financial assistance from foreign minds and foreign markets. We have the idea and the resources ourselves. The more local, the more nature friendly the farming will become, climate change will have that lesser impact. Give more ownership to true farmers and the care for farm land will dramatically increase.
The climate change action plan should give most, if not all, of its energy on these issues. The policy should give focus on maintaining and improving: (a) land quality; (b) local supplementing resources; (c) local water harvesting; (d) locally suitable and available cropping techniques; (e) gradual but time bound shift from chemical fertiliser to farmer produced natural fertilisers with large scale alteration in fertiliser subsidizing system; (f) development and use of pesticides and herbicides from local sources; (g) developing model center of excellence for study and dissemination of organic agriculture; (h) land rights to true practicing farmers; (i) Zero tolerance to conversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural use; (j) identification of tolerant and suitable local varieties of crops and varieties; (k) crop specific and weather specific multiple crop insurance choices for farmers; (l) macro pest management, but non-toxic, in case of rapidly growing pest attacks etc; (m) disincentive to energy and nutrient intensive cropping practices; and (n) a resolve to make Orissa a chemical and fertiliser free state by 2030.
The district and block level perspective plans for agriculture should carry on these motto and ideas. Government must not carry on with its campaign that agriculture growth can only be achieved through more intensification of chemical and alien materials. This gives a very wrong vibe to farmers. Farming can be made sustainable, profitable and climate change tolerant if the farmers are free from external human influences. Government claims to have established 12 ‘model organic farms’. Let those farm and other similar farms break the news that the people can be fed adequately well even without high-cost practices. Let Odisha’s Climate Change Action Plan be brave in this regard and show light to others.
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