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PS Vijayshankar, an expert on sustainable farming and water resource management, interviewed by Shreehari Paliath (India Spend)

-India Spend

India's transition to sustainable farming has to be calibrated and orchestrated well, drawing lessons from the successes of India's Green Revolution and the recent crisis in Sri Lanka, says sustainable farming expert P.S. Vijayshankar

Bengaluru: The production-centric intensive agriculture brought about by India's Green Revolution in the 1960s, using high-yielding seeds, fertilisers and high levels of groundwater utilisation, helped India achieve food self-sufficiency by the 1970s, but has created a crisis of depletion of soil health, groundwater, and other natural resources, said P.S. Vijayshankar, an expert on sustainable farming and water resource management. What India needs now is an ecosystem-centric approach to agriculture, which understands that agricultural production draws resources from the ecosystem, and that there are limits to these resources, Vijayshankar told us in an interview about the impacts of industrial agriculture, sustainable agriculture policy and the imperative of sustainable natural resource management.

While the Union government has announced policies and schemes to promote a transition to non-chemical farming, its decision in October 2022 to grant approval for herbicide-tolerant, genetically-modified mustard (GM Mustard) for commercial use reveals confusion in the government's approach to agriculture, said Vijayshankar. As India attempts to bring about a paradigm shift to chemical-free and sustainable agricultural practices, lessons should be drawn from the coherent approach of the Green Revolution, by ensuring adequate research, administrative and financial support for natural farming, said Vijayshankar. India's transition should also be well calibrated, learning from the recent crisis in Sri Lanka, as the abrupt withdrawal of chemical fertilisers can adversely impact yield, and thus farmer's income, he said.

Vijayshankar has lived and worked among Adivasi communities for over 30 years, and is co-founder of Samaj Pragati Sahayog (SPS), a civil society organisation that works on water, sustainable agriculture and livelihoods in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. He was a member of multiple government expert groups, including for the Ministry of Rural Development's Integrated Watershed Management Programme (2009-14) and the Expert Group for the formulation of Madhya Pradesh's State Water Policy (2019). He is also a founding director of Nature Positive Farming and Wholesome Foods Foundation (N+3F), a Bengaluru-based non-profit which promotes sustainable agriculture.

Edited excerpts:

* You have written about building farm resilience to manage the climate vulnerability of agriculture, and the need for India to move from the production-centric approach of the Green Revolution, to an ecosystem-centric view of agriculture. Could you elaborate?

A few decades before Independence, the rate of growth of agriculture was low. At the time of Independence, core food producing areas in the west were lost [due to Partition] and food security became a primary concern. In the early 1940s, there was a famine in Bengal. [Due to this], India began a production-centric approach with a focus on food security.

Big dams were constructed and the net sown area increased from 118 million acres [in 1950] to 140 million in 1970, and has stagnated since. Between 1950 and 1960, India's food production increased substantially, by over 30%. But subsequent events in the mid-1960s--two consecutive wars and back-to-back droughts--led to the Green Revolution, which proposed to raise food production and provide food security. It introduced intensive agriculture where more inputs (water, pesticides, high yield seeds) were used to increase yield per unit of land. It apparently became a success within a decade, as India attained self-sufficiency in food [by the 1970s] and food import was stopped. However, this did not provide nutritional security in the country as pervasive undernutrition is prevalent even today.

Production-centric agriculture has created a crisis that impacts soil, groundwater, and natural resources. Soil degradation and depletion of soil health has become a problem. Excessive use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides have also contributed to soil degradation. Now we need to develop an ecosystem-centric approach. The production-centric approach lacks an understanding of the ecosystem. In the ecosystem-centric approach, the production system is seen as a subset of an ecosystem, which draws resources from the ecosystem. It uses the ecosystem as a source of raw material and also dumps waste into it. Any ecosystem has limits and a production-centric view does not recognise this.

The need for a different perspective has been around for nearly half a century, but now there is more recognition of the crisis as stakeholders talk about agroecology.

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Image Courtesy: India Spend