Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore   

‘Scarcity of food grain likely in India’

Photo: S. Siva Saravanan

RECOGNITION: D. Ramachandra Prasad, Area Co-ordinator, University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore (right) receiving the Best Centre Award for contribution to Weed Surveillance Programme from S. Sankaran, former Vice-Chancellor, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (third right) in Coimbatore on Sunday. Jay G. Varshney, Director, DWSR, Jabalpur (second left) and Registrar P. Subbian (left) are in the picture. —

COIMBATORE: Food production and population growth were in tandem till the 1990s. However, in the last one decade, food growth rate reduced from 2.1 per cent to 1.2 per cent. This has been to a large extent attributed to failure of weed control. Country may face scarcity of food grain in the future,” S. Sankaran, former Vice-Chancellor, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), said here on Sunday.

Inaugurating a national symposium on “Weed Threat to Environment, Bio-diversity and Agricultural Productivity”, he said the threat of scarcity had also been predicted by the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, the United States. It had warned that India would fall short of 40 per cent of food required in the coming decade.

“The Indian Government has launched the National Food Security Mission whereby it has been proposed to increase additional production of 10 million tonnes of rice, eight million tonnes of wheat and two million tonnes of pulses annually. There is also a forecast that India will require 250 million tonnes of food grains in 2020,” Mr. Sankaran said.

He believed that by proper weed management alone India would be able to increase 10 per cent of food grain production in a year. The challenges could be overcome by weed scientists, he hoped.

Speaking on global warming and climate change, Mr. Sankaran said they had a significant role to play in weed management. “Due to increase in green house gases, the infestation of weeds is reported to increase world-wide. Particularly, due to increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, certain obnoxious weeds like Parthenium will increase rapidly. Hence, new weed control methodologies have to be developed for different eco systems”.

With respect to organic agriculture, it was growing at a good pace at both the export and domestic levels. Jay G. Varshney, Director, Directorate of Weed Science Research, Jabalpur, lamented that though one-third of damage in crop productivity occurred due to the presence of weeds, it had not got due attention from policy planners and administrators.

“Nearly 50 per cent of the production is lost due to weeds. Therefore, even if 10 per cent of weeds are controlled, food security will improve. Weed control is not only important from the point of view of food, but also important to protect bio-diversity and valuable bio-germ plasms,” Mr. Varshney said.

Mentioning that the symposium was part of the Weed Surveillance Project 2006, he said that 267 districts in 10 States were under the project.

P. Subbian, Registrar of TNAU, said that estimates showed that weeds caused a loss of Rs. 2,000 crore per annum.

Out of the total 826 weed species, 80 were reported to be very serious and 198 as serious.

The two-day symposium is being jointly organised by the university, Directorate of Weed Science Research and Indian Society of Weed Science.

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