Precision farming needs to be promoted to get more output with less exploitation of natural resources

Against this backdrop, the moot question that arises is: What is the real cause behind such a rapid deterioration in nature’s wealth and whether humanity will be able to feed itself in a sustainable manner. Are there any silver linings on the horizon with improved scientific knowledge? Or do we need to go back to natural farming/organic farming to survive? These are some of the questions weighing over every awakened citizen’s mind. The extreme weather events such as the recent heat waves in Europe and Asia alongside droughts and floods in other areas, exacerbate these issues even more.

Let us focus here on the imbalance between people, our planet and the political economy of policies.

What we know is that roughly it took more than 2,00,000 years for homo sapiens to evolve into the current form of mankind. In 1804, for the first time in history, the human population touched one billion. The next billion was added in 123 years with the count touching two billion by 1927. Several major breakthroughs in medical science ensured that the next billion was added in just 33 years by 1960. Thereafter, humanity progressed even faster, no matter that a country like India faced a “ship to mouth” situation on the food front. The next billion was added in just 14 years with the population reaching four billion in 1974. The next billion took just 13 years (five billion in 1987), 11 years thereafter (six billion in 1998), 12 years thereon (seven billion in 2010), and another 12 years to touch eight billion in 2022. This explosive growth of humans, with higher and higher aspirations, has created a huge imbalance between the demands of people and the capacity of this planet to supply them in a sustainable manner.

Can this planet provide food for all through natural farming without the use of any chemical fertilisers, pesticides, modern high yielding varieties of seeds, etc? Many governments, religious organisations, and some NGOs and individuals believe that there is no option but to go back to nature and practice organic/natural farming. Sri Lanka, for example, wanted to get rid of chemical fertilizers. Even in India, we have some states (like Sikkim) declared as organic states, and many others are attempting to do so. Even the Union government has initiated a major programme on natural farming along the Ganga, five kilometres on each side of its banks. Many states like Andhra Pradesh are also scaling up natural farming. I have nothing against such efforts and I feel that farmers should have all the freedom to practice whichever farming techniques make sense to them, so long as they are safe for society, augment their incomes and ensure food security for the masses through ample availability of food at affordable prices.

Most of the studies conducted by ICAR in India show that with the adoption of natural farming yields go down for major staple crops like wheat and rice by as much as 30 to 50 per cent. These experiments have been conducted by scientists under specific conditions over three years. But there is other evidence at the individual farmer level that this author knows of, which shows that yields recover back to normal levels after some time. Given that India is going to be the most populous country on the planet in 2023, we need to take policy decisions with better and more scientific evidence if we want to avoid a Sri Lanka-like fiasco.

For me, the answer lies in aggressively promoting precision farming. It is this science of precision farming that can give us “more from less”. The innovations and developments in GIS (Geographical Information System), AIML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning), which can use enormous data to bring about precision in farming, use of sensors, drones, doves, and LEOs (low earth orbits), space technologies, cloud computing, are all bursting out to provide the basis for a revolutionary epoch. Drips, hydroponics, and aeroponics, vertical farming, are all available for mankind to get much more with very little exploitation of the planet’s natural resource endowment.

But one critical factor in all this is the political economy. In India, specifically, we have the culture of free power, free water, almost 80 to 90 per cent subsidy on urea, and so on. These subsidy policies may have been good in the 1960s or the 1970s when the country was hugely food deficit. But they are continuing and even increasing. This casts serious doubt on whether we want to get the best results from the limited use of natural resources. It is this policy conundrum which is leading to irrational exploitation of nature’s wealth. Who will bell the cat?

Gulati is Distinguished Professor at ICRIER. Views are personal