Despite Potential, India Struggles to Feed Itself Gains of Green Revolution Are Fading

By Somini Sengupta

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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Forty years ago, to an India synonymous with famine and want, came the Green Revolution. A massive development effort led by pioneering scientists and American foundations, it introduced high- yielding varieties of rice and wheat, expanded the use of irrigation, pesticides and fertilizers, and transformed these northwestern plains into the breadbasket of India.

Between 1968 and 1998 the production of grains in India more than doubled. For years dependent on food aid, the country grew enough grain to feed its people.

But during the past decade, just as increasing affluence has led many Indians to demand more and different varieties of food, the gains of the Green Revolution have been slowing, so that today the Indian population is growing faster than the country’s ability to produce more rice and wheat.

The supply of arable land is second only to that of the United States, but its agricultural output lags far behind its potential. As a result, the government has had to turn to already stretched international markets, putting further pressure on high global food prices.

With the right technology and public policy, economists say, India could help feed the world. Instead, it can barely feed itself.

The country recently began what it calls a “food security mission” designed to increase production of its staples – wheat, rice and pulses, which include lentils and peas. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called for what he termed a Second Green Revolution “so that the specter of food shortages is banished from the horizon once again.”

Experts blame the agriculture slowdown on a variety of factors. India has failed to expand irrigation or access to loans for farmers, or to advance agricultural research. Groundwater is being depleted at alarming rates, a problem that climate change threatens to exacerbate.

According to the Peterson Institute in Washington, changes in temperature and rain patterns could diminish the agricultural output of India by 30 percent by the 2080s.

Already, family farms have shrunk in size and quantity, and a few years ago, mounting debt began to drive Indian farmers to suicide. Many farmers find it more profitable to sell their land to developers building the industrial might of India.

Among farmers who stay on their land, many are experimenting with growing high-value fruits and vegetables that prosperous Indians are craving, but there are hardly any refrigerated trucks to transport their produce to modern supermarkets. Indeed, a long and inefficient supply chain means that the average Indian farmer receives less than a fifth of the price that the consumer pays, according to a World Bank study, far less than farmers in, say, Thailand or the United States.

Surinder Singh Chawla knows that the system is broken. Chawla, 62, bore witness to the Green Revolution – and its demise.

Once, his family grew wheat and potatoes on 20 acres, or 8 hectares. They looked to the sky for rains. They used cow manure for fertilizer. Then came the Mexican semi-dwarf wheat seedlings that the revolution helped introduce to India. Chawla’s wheat yields soared. A few years later, the same happened with new high-yield rice seeds.

Increasingly prosperous, Chawla finally bought his first tractor in 1980.

But he has since witnessed with horror the ills that the revolution has wrought. In a common occurrence here, his water table has sunk by 100 feet, or 30 meters, during three decades as he and other farmers irrigated their fields.

By the 1980s, government investment in canals fed by rivers had tapered off, and wells became the principal source of irrigation, helped by a shortsighted government policy of free electricity to pump water.

Here in Punjab, more than three-fourths of the districts extract more groundwater than nature replenishes.

Between 1980 and 2002, the government continued to heavily subsidize fertilizers and food grains for the poor, but reduced its total investment in agriculture. Public spending on farming shrank by roughly a third, according to an analysis of government data by the Center for Policy Alternatives in New Delhi.

In particular, expansion of irrigation canals slowed to a trickle. Now only 40 percent of Indian farms are irrigated. The majority of farmers survive entirely at the mercy of the rains.

“When there is no water, there is nothing,” Chawla said.

And he sees new clouds on the horizon. The summers are hotter than he remembers. The rains are more fickle. Last summer, he said he wanted to ease out of growing rice, a water-intensive crop.

The gains of the Green Revolution have begun to ebb in other countries, too, like Indonesia and the Philippines, experts say. But the implications in India are greater because of its sheer size.

For example, India raised a red flag two years ago about how heavily the appetites of 1.1 billion people would weigh on world food prices. For the first time in many years, when world wheat prices were exorbitant, India had to import wheat for its grain stockpile. In two years, it bought about seven million tons from abroad.

Two staples of the Indian diet are now imported in ever- increasing quantities, because farmers cannot keep up with growing demand – pulses and vegetable oils, the main sources of protein and calories for most Indians. Malaysia is India’s biggest source of oil, Myanmar its biggest source of pulses.

“India could be a big actor in supplying food to the rest of the world if the existing agricultural productivity gap could be closed,” said Adolfo Brizzi, manager of the South Asia agriculture program at the World Bank in Washington. “When it goes to the market to import, it typically puts pressure on international market prices, and every time India goes for export, it increases the supply and therefore mitigates the price levels.”

Indian consumers have also been affected; wholesale prices soared more than 8 percent in May, the highest rate in three years, leading the prime minister to warn that high food prices could “impede economic growth.”

Without further investment, farmers are skeptical that they can increase crop yields and alleviate price pressures.

Earlier this spring, in a village called Udhopur, Harmail Singh, 60, supervised his wheat harvest and wondered aloud how farmers could possibly be expected to grow more grain. “The cultivable land is shrinking and government policies are not farmer friendly,” he said, repeating a common refrain among men of his generation. “Our next generation is not willing to work in agriculture. They say it is a losing proposition.”

The luckiest farmers make more money selling out to land-hungry developers.

Gurmeet Singh Bassi, 33, blessed with a farm on the edges of a booming Punjabi city called Ludhiana, sold off most of his ancestral land. Its value had grown more than fivefold in two years. He made enough to buy land in a more remote part of the state, and hire laborers to till it.

Chawla watched his neighbors migrate to North America. They were happy to lease their land to him, if he was foolish enough to stay and work it, Chawla said. Today, he cultivates more than 100 acres.

Last year, on a small patch of that land, he planted what no one in his village could imagine putting on their plate: baby corn, which he learned was being lapped up by upscale urban Indian restaurants and even sold abroad.

At the time, baby corn fetched the best returns, certainly much better than the government’s set price for his wheat crop.

This had been the Green Revolution’s other pillar – a fixed government price for grain. A farmer could sell his crop to a private trader, but for many small tillers, it was far easier to approach the nearest government granary, and accept their rate.

For years, those prices remained miserably low, farmers and their advocates complained, and there was little incentive for farmers to invest in their crop. “For farmers,” argued M.S. Swaminathan, a plant geneticist who helped adapt the Green Revolution to Indian soil, “a remunerative price is the best fertilizer.”

Swaminathan’s adage proved true this year. After having to import wheat for two years, the government offered farmers a substantially higher price for their grain. Farmers not only planted slightly more wheat, but they sold much more of their harvest to the state. As a result, by May, buffer stocks were brimming at record levels.

Nanda Kumar, the most senior Indian bureaucrat for food, said that the country would not need to go to the world market this year to buy wheat. That is good news, for both India and the world market, but how long it will remain the case is unclear.

Will greater Indian demand for food and higher market prices enrich farmers eventually, encouraging them to stay on their land? There is potential, but related problems, like inefficient transportation and supply chains, would have to improve, too.

The agricultural crisis in India has been mitigated by two factors. Indian cereal consumption per capita is declining, as wealthier Indians diversify their diets in favor of more vegetables, milk, and eggs. And because Indians as a whole are not big meat eaters, either because they are vegetarians, or because they are too poor to afford meat, Indian demand for grain to feed animals is lower than in other countries, including China.

China produces much more food per acre than India, with less arable land. Partly, that is because authorities in Beijing have more aggressively invested in key elements of the original Green Revolution, chief among them, irrigation. Chinese rice yields per acre are double those of India.

How to address Indian agricultural challenges is a matter of fertile debate.

From one quarter comes pressure to introduce genetically modified crops. Field trials are now under way across India for eggplant, cauliflower and tomato seeds – and so are legal challenges from environmentalists.

From other quarters comes a plea to preserve Indian biodiversity, and a reminder that a second Green Revolution, if it were to come now, would have to take new scarcities into account.

“This time around, we need to put ‘green’ in Green Revolution,” said Alexander Evans, author of a recent paper on food prices published by at Chatham House, a British research institution. “It needs to be more efficient in its use of water, in its use of energy, in its use of fertilizer and land.”

Swaminathan wants to dedicate entire villages to sowing lentils and oilseeds, to keep up with demand.

The World Bank, meanwhile, favors high-value crops, like Chawla’s baby corn, on the grounds that they allow small farmers to maximize income from small landholdings.

Chawla no longer grows baby corn. To take advantage of expanding demand for cooking oil, he has planted a field of sunflowers.

Now, with an eye on skyrocketing global prices, he is also considering sowing more wheat.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.