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In a belated response to the
challenges posed by climate change, India has finally prepared an action plan.
The thrust of the National Action Plan on Climate Change, unveiled by the Prime
Minister is on energy. The plan identifies eight core “national missions”
running through 2017 and directs ministries to submit detailed implementation
plans to the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change by December 2008. Not
surprisingly, one of the weakest links in the Action Plan is its response to
agriculture. Whereas market based incentives have been formulated for industry
and affluent consumers, like automobile owners, not much is proposed to rescue
farmers, who will be the worst affected category, standing perhaps, to lose
their livelihoods. They and poor consumers are not visible in the national
deliberations and have been left to cope on their own. This is demoralising
specially when it has been projected by practically all the models generated by
international teams of scientists, that South Asia will be amongst the worst
affected areas impacted by global warming and would face serious challenges to
food production.
In India, food security has
still not been achieved on a sustained basis as we remain totally dependent on
the monsoons to achieve food production targets. With its dependence on the
monsoon and its low levels of irrigation, only a third of the country’s
agriculture is irrigated, the rest being rain fed, the prospect of swings in the
monsoon are a frightening possibility. Yet, little is being planned to cope with
this situation, which is not in some distant future, but is upon us. The
meteorological department’s linkage with agriculture departments remains a
formality, when actually they should be working closely together to predict the
onset of the rainy seasons and planning planting cycles according to that.
If the onset of the South-west
monsoon is delayed, farmers can be told to delay planting their rice; if on the
other hand, as we saw this year, the rains came very early, farmers could have
been advised to plant another suitable crop. Swings in rainfall patterns are
expected to intensify with climate change, so coordination between the Met
department and agriculture departments will become even more crucial and
necessary in future.
What is worrying though is
that far from responding to the rapidly changing situation with any urgency, our
system of agriculture research and implementation seems to be immobile and
unable to cope. The Indian Council of Agriculture Research, India’s leading
agency (some would say, leading in expenditure rather than competence) has still
not revealed any plans on how it proposes to adapt to food production in a
warming world. No strategies have been prepared, nor any changes in research
strategies developed to address the impact of global warming on agriculture in
the many agro climatic zones in the country.
Perhaps the most urgent
requirement today is to anticipate how the crop cycle in each of the agro
climatic zones will be affected by the predicted rise in temperatures. New crop
varieties will be needed to plant in situations where the older crop varieties
that were well adapted earlier, will not be so, when the conditions are warmer.
Say for instance, the varieties of maize that are being cultivated in the
mountain belt of Himachal Pradesh, will not perform well there when temperatures
rise. New varieties of maize will have to be developed for that eventuality.
Developing a new variety and testing its suitability for a region takes time.
It takes even more time to
generate enough planting material like seeds or tubers to make available to
farmers. An exercise begun today will yield results only in some years. Yet, the
country’s agriculture research and implementation machinery sits inertly, unable
to react either timely or appropriately.
Overhauling the ICAR has been
on the cards for a long time. It is high time this exercise is undertaken and a
new ICAR crafted to make it more responsive to the challenges that Indian
agriculture is facing. Fresh blood needs to be inducted and a radical new
approach and fresh plans are needed which include the perspectives and
experience of a range of stakeholders who are seldom consulted in agriculture
planning. These should include experts in diverse fields like water
conservation, ecology, pest control, genetics and plant breeding working in
formal institutions and in civil society organisations (CSOs).
Many groups working on the
ground have valuable experiences and suggestions that should be heard. The
indigenous knowledge of rural and tribal people must be tapped and combined with
formal science to find solutions and to create new opportunities.
Suman Sahai
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