As farmers as soon as once more protest in India – three years on from the greatest peaceable civil society protest on this planet – it’s price remembering that agriculture was additionally a important problem for the nation in its first many years. The nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, bluntly acknowledged that “every thing can wait, however not agriculture.”
This line of pondering finally led to the Inexperienced Revolution of the late Nineteen Sixties, forging India’s meals safety and offering much-needed income for a few of its farmers. However again within the current, a looming water disaster has returned Indian agriculture to the highlight.
Farmers’ grievances
The Inexperienced Revolution harnessed high-yield grain varieties, water-intensive practices (largely reliant on pumped groundwater) and heavy fertiliser use. Understanding that such investments wouldn’t be made by farmers with out a assured market, the Indian authorities additionally created a minimal help worth (MSP) for wheat in 1966-67.
This set a base worth for presidency procurement at a sure proportion above enter prices, and due to this fact assured farmers an assured purchaser: even when the vast majority of the crop was not purchased by the federal government, the MSP set a ground worth for different consumers.
Right this moment, the MSP regime covers 23 crops: types of cereals, pulses and a few money crops like sugarcane and cotton. It has been very profitable in incentivising meals manufacturing. So, as a substitute of getting to import grain as was the case earlier than the Inexperienced Revolution, by 2017 India was the world’s largest producer of pulses and jute and the second-largest producer of wheat, rice and sugarcane.
However solely the MSP for sugarcane is assured beneath the Important Commodities Act of 1955; at their coronary heart, the latest farmers’ protests in India are a name for the whole MSP regime to be legalised. To many Indian farmers, that is the one assure of some degree of monetary safety. Nevertheless, the positive factors of the Inexperienced Revolution and the MSP regime (in its present kind) are at the moment being undone by a sequence of challenges, together with water.
Finite assets pushed to the brink
In Nineteenth-century India, the British viceroy Lord Curzon described the Indian economic system as “a raffle on the monsoons”. When India started extracting its groundwater this problem pale, however new challenges had been created. India is now the greatest person of groundwater on this planet and water ranges throughout India have plummeted accordingly: in 2022, the situation of 12 per cent of India’s aquifers had been categorised by the federal government as “semi-critical”; 4 per cent as “important”; and 14 per cent as “overexploited”.
With 87 per cent of extracted groundwater in India used for irrigation, the longer term seems bleak. A 2019 Indian authorities report estimated that 74 per cent of the realm the place wheat is cultivated, and 65 per cent of the realm the place rice is grown, will face water shortages. Probably the most severely impacted elements of India are the semi-arid zones in its north-western area, the place the planting of wheat and paddy (which kind the majority of presidency procurement) is probably the most intense. That is the place a lot of the protesting farmers come from.
The over-extraction of groundwater has additionally led to larger concentrations of arsenic. This has triggered long-running well being crises in states together with Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.
Lastly, this deal with a restricted vary of crops means the overwhelming majority of indigenous seeds are disappearing. And that threatens a future for India by which it could be depending on only a few varieties of seeds.
A bigger water disaster impacts agriculture
All of that is occurring within the context of a difficult water future. India’s inhabitants quantity has taken off since independence, however its water assets stay the identical. Water availability is estimated to be beneath 1,486 cubic metres per particular person, which is alarming on condition that 1,700 cubic metres is normally thought of the benchmark for water stress.
In the meantime, the most recent report on the Himalayan area by the Worldwide Centre for Built-in Mountain Growth (ICIMOD) estimates the area will hit “peak water” by 2050, after which water availability will decline.
Insufficient authorities response
The Inexperienced Revolution was conceptualised at a time when India had far much less assets to know its water wants, however half a century later, the federal government has nothing new to supply.
In September 2020, it handed three farm legal guidelines that had been repealed in November 2021. The legal guidelines pushed for higher market entry, contract farming, and fewer regulation of important commodities. They didn’t assure MSPs and in response, plenty of state governments handed legal guidelines that did assure MSPs.
The weakening of the MSP regime was seen as a further menace to the monetary safety of farmers, who’re already coping with lowered water tables, climate-induced floods and drought exacerbation, fluctuating monsoons and degraded soils from extreme fertiliser use – whereas these legal guidelines may need lowered procurement prices for the federal government, they did nothing to cope with the farming group’s myriad water points.
Because the agricultural professional Devinder Sharma factors out, farmers at the moment earn about INR 27 (USD 0.33) per day from farming: they want extra help, not much less.
India gained independence within the wake of the Bengal famine in 1943, by which thousands and thousands starved to dying. Right this moment, lots of of thousands and thousands reliant on agriculture face a catastrophic future as water availability dwindles. The federal government ought to know by now that every thing can wait, however not agriculture.
This story was revealed with permission from The Third Pole.
