The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Empower farmers with know-how: experts

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 17, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Empower farmers with know-how: experts

Staff Reporter

— Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.

Food mood: (From left) The former UAS Vice-Chancellor R. Dwarkinath, the former ISRO Chairman U.R. Rao, and Institution of Agricultural Technologists Vice-President A. Umesh Rao at the World Food Day function in Bangalore on Tuesday.

BANGALORE: The State’s 72 lakh families who depend on agriculture do not have uniform access to external inputs that can help optimise the use of available resources to become totally food secure, R. Dwarkinath, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, said here on Tuesday.

Speaking on “The Right to Food” at the World Food Day celebrations at the Institution of Agricultural Technologists, Dr. Dwarkinath said it was time to revisit the true meaning of “right to food” to address the causes of large-scale suicides by farmers and the slow transfer of technology to the field from the laboratory.

Right to food, he said did not mean “the right to be fed” but the right to be enabled to get access to food and the know-how for increasing productivity safely and without the fear of losing crops, he said.

Most farmers had very little exposure to the world outside a 30-km radius of where they lived and worked and had no access to external inputs on modern agriculture practices, technologies and so on. Their familiarity with traditional methods of farming often made them apprehensive of the “new knowledge”, and this was what the system should address through various stakeholders, he said.

Dr. Dwarkinath said agriculture had now become a business, and farmers were not familiar with the behaviour of market forces. It was time to return to familiar ground and look at success stories in the traditional domain before expecting farmers to harness modern practices, he said, and gave the example of innovative farmer Rudraradya in Shimoga, who had successfully demonstrated in situ moisture retention in his smallholding, instead of depending on methods over which he had little control, like check-dams or just waiting for rains.

The former Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation U.R. Rao said India had also to double its food production in the next four decades to provide food security to its projected population of 1.6 billion. For this it had to increase the average foodgrain productivity from the present 1.7 tonnes a hectare to over 4 tonnes a ha.

Subsistence farmers

Subsistence farmers, who largely depended on human and animal muscle power, with very few exceptions who used post-mechanised practices and chemical fertilizers, had been the victims of severe soil erosion, land degradation and water scarcity.

Estimates indicated that top-soil loss, non-optimal agricultural practices, gross misuse of water resources, inadequate water recharging and overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides had severely degraded over 100 million ha of arable land in the country.

New strategies

Prof. Rao said farmers could not increase productivity to the required degree on a sustainable basis, unless they adopted the strategies of the third-wave information technology revolution, involving genetic methods, knowledge-based agricultural practices and space technology inputs for planning, monitoring and implementing precision farming techniques using Geographic Information System inputs.

However, even without these tools and aids, traditional knowledge and practices could still be successfully harnessed to help farmers make decisions, and this need not be considered an impediment to increasing productivity, Prof. Rao said.

The programme was organised by IAT, AME Foundation, FREEDOM and the Department of Agriculture.

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