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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Water and sustainable agriculture by S Janakarajan


The key message of the book is that agriculture in South Asia is quite heavily stressed due to A complex set of socio-economic, agro-climatic, and hydrological factors

WATER, AGRICULTURE AND SUSTAINABLE WELL-BEING: Edited by Unai Pascual, Amita Shah, Jayanta Bandyopadhyay; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 750.

“Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day.” This is among the most important of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set by the United Nations. We are just six years away from the targeted year of 2015 to reduce the proportion of people living in poverty to 24.5 per cent in South Asia. But regrettably according to the 2005 U.N. estimate, 39 per cent of the population in this region lives in extreme poverty and this number has apparently gone up since then due to the global financial crisis.

Issues related to water governance — specifically ensuring its sustainable use, quality, equitable distribution, and a holistic approach — have been widely recognised as most critical to sustainable agriculture and poverty eradication. Pollution loads generated by municipalities and industries, and extensive use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture have compounded the water-related problems. What’s more, all interventions by government for alleviating poverty may become futile, if the present disturbing trends are not checked. This book, a collection of papers presented at the Ninth Biennial Conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE), needs to be viewed in this perspective.

Arsenic contamination

Arsenic contamination in groundwater is a serious health hazard in South Asia, particularly Bangladesh and the eastern parts of India. The section devoted to this subject addresses questions such as: Will people be willing to pay for clean drinking water rather than take the contaminated water and incur huge health expenditure on countering its ill-effects? Or in a situation, where the people may have to trade off the occurrence of possible health hazards in the long run to the economic and social benefits of government policies? How should one approach the problem if the water contamination is due to non-point source pollution, for instance heavy use of chemical inputs?

In conflict

Water conservation, agricultural growth, and food security are the most relevant issues today but they seem to be in conflict with one another. Sustainable agriculture is the buzz word in all national and international conventions. How to go about making agriculture sustainable? What are the challenges ahead? Isn’t it necessary to view the farm economic system as a subset of farm ecosystem? Are the worsening trade imbalances between the North and the South due to the flaws in the agricultural policy being pursued? Does the recurrence of floods and drought lead to higher poverty levels? Is cultivation of plantation crops in the hill regions ecologically sustainable? These are some of the issues examined in the section on “water, sustainable agriculture and food security.”

Trapped

One paper discusses a process in which farmers get trapped in an “interlocked” situation, due to constant and overuse of pesticides (pesticides account for 50-60 per cent of the cost of cotton cultivation in Andhra Pradesh), and the consequences are disastrous — severe indebtedness, suicides, and, of course, unsustainable agriculture.

The section titled “Challenges and solutions for better sustainability” is relatively weak. There are two chapters which address the challenges and speak of possible routes to sustainable agriculture. Some of the suggestions are: rotating crops; leaving the land fallow for the level of top soil nutrients to rise; and adopting scientific soil conservation.

Overall, this book has a good deal of policy relevance. Most of the contributors have attempted to formalise the empirical evidence which adds to the academic rigour of the book. The editors deserve all appreciation for a well written introduction.

The key message of the book is straightforward: Agriculture in South Asia is quite heavily stressed due to a complex set of socio-economic, agro-climatic, and hydrological factors. Features such as pollution of water and soil, salinity, and the recurrence of droughts and floods contribute further to the burden. All these are clear manifestations of appalling governance that has resulted in perpetual indebtedness, poverty, deprivation and suicide deaths among farmers. This volume in this context contributes significantly to the better understanding of (un)sustainable agriculture and the stressed agrarian conditions of farmers in South Asia.