Monsoon and agriculture
All eyes have been skyward in recent weeks in North India. July is when most of the rain falls in Southern Asia. However, the rain gods have played truant this year. Despite all the advances made with irrigation and technology, agriculture is still hugely dependent on rain. The first table below (see the entire Times of India article) shows how rainfall correlates brutally and directly with GDP growth, and thus with poverty alleviation. A similar correlation can be drawn with Inflation which has been near zero for a while in India but is now creeping up. Newspapers are full of stories about how prices of pulses, a major source of protein for Indians, have nearly doubled. Farmers, who we often forget are also consumers of food items, rarely get a decent share of the rise in the price of food grains, pulses and vegetables when production starts to slip. Most profits are cornered by traders. As farmers earn less and pay more their incomes drop. Governments have to scramble to provide a safety net say through rural employment programs, leaving aside long term priorities for the moment.
Reducing agriculture's vulnerability to variation in rain fall is no easy task. There is a physical limit to how much precipitation you can trap in the ground in times of abundance for use later. Short term palliatives like planting coarse grains and other drought resistant plants are hampered by: lack of extension and training, farmer buy-in into high yielding, water-guzzling varieties and sub-optimal marketing of alternative produce. Often it is too late by the time the farmer realizes he needs to do something different. Rains may turn out to be normal the following year and it is easy to recline back into old habits.
This perspective changes if integrated, sustainable agriculture is practiced on a long term basis. It is well documented that use of green manure, composting methods, rotation and inter-cropping reduces the need for water and raises the resilience of the system as a whole. Diversity of agriculture production itself acts as an insurance against the vagaries of weather. The challenge, however, is that this is not 'lazy' agriculture – neither for the farmer nor for Government and extension agencies. You cannot just bung in the seeds, douse the soil with Urea and DAP, flip over the motor switch that pumps out ground water and wait for harvest day. The farmer has to plan, be in tune with what is happening at the farm and in the market, innovate, in short act more like an entrepreneur than a cog in the production chain. The extension agencies – government or non-government – have to be out in the fields, reducing the lab to land distance, collapsing the field to fork gap. We all – as consumers of food – have to step up to the plate by eating local, diverse, fresh and nutritious.
As I finish this piece, Delhi has had an evening of torrential rain. More than 50% of the rain to fall since June has come down in a single evening. The hope is that Kharif planting may not be completely lost and some moisture may stay in the soil till fall for the Rabi cropping season. It may not be a drought year after all. Business as usual next year?
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