The Condition of Punjab
(The
(Part-2)
Scars of the Green Revolution
Bhaskar Goswami
A severely eroded natural resource base is aggravating the already deep crisis in agriculture while farmers and farms are paying a heavy price in terms of stagnating yields and a loss of biodiversity. The agricultural growth rate in
A swathe of negative trends Against a national average of 40 per cent, almost 85 per cent of the State is under cultivation, of which 97 per cent is irrigated. A highly intensive form of agriculture in terms of land, capital, nutrients, water, energy and other inputs is practised in the State. The diminishing size of holdings has forced farmers to increase the cropping intensity, which has risen from 126 per cent in 1960 to 189 per cent in 2009, putting both soil and water under tremendous stress over the last five decades.
Farmers largely rotate crops of wheat and paddy over the year. The area under paddy has increased ten-fold during 1960-2009 while that under wheat two-and-a-half times, all of which are High Yielding Varieties (HYV). These intensive monocultures of wheat and paddy have displaced other crops like pulses, maize bajra, jowar, groundnut, barley, rapeseed, and mustard; crops that were once endemic to the State.
As per the 2007 State of Environment report, prior to the Green Revolution, 41 varieties of wheat, 37 varieties of rice, four varieties of maize, there varieties of bajra, 16 varieties of sugarcane, 19 varieties of pulses, nine varieties of oil seeds and 10 varieties of cotton were grown in Punjab. Present data indicates that out of 47 post green revolution varieties of wheat released by
The picture is equally bleak on the livestock front, whose population has declined by 12.7 per cent between 1997 and 2003. The animal diversity is also dwindling and only three breeds each of cows, buffaloes and sheep and two breeds each of goats and poultry predominate. The Sahiwal breed of cattle, Lohi sheep, Nilli Ravi buffaloes and Beetal breed of goat are threatened species. This decline in diversity and numbers of livestock is also an indicator of the erosion of traditional integrated farming practices across the State.
The immediate impact of intensive monoculture cultivation practices is seen on the soils, which face severe degradation due to erosion and salt deposition. Also, the fertility in terms of both macro and micro-nutrients has declined steadily. This in turn has pushed farmers to apply larger doses of chemical fertilisers whose consumption has increased eight-fold in the last 50 years. After Andhra Pradesh, per hectare application of fertilisers is the highest in
The fact is, sick soils have lost their ability to respond to inputs like fertilizers, a reason for stagnating productivity. This decrease in response indicates that the organic carbon content and microbial activities in the soil, which are critical for crop development, have declined. While dying soils should have evoked concern decades back, all that is on offer now are further interventions that aim to promote more of the external input-intensive farming that in the first place caused the problem.
The immediate impact of intensive monoculture cultivation practices is seen on the soils, which face severe degradation due to erosion and salt deposition.
The reckless application of chemical fertilisers has contaminated water bodies. A November 2009 study, Ground Water Quality for Irrigation in
Another practice that is affecting soil fertility is burning of post-harvest straw on croplands that produced it. This is ostensibly done to ensure early readiness of the fields for the subsequent crop. The State produces around 230 lakh tonnes of paddy straw and 170 lakh tonnes of wheat straw each year. Of this, almost 80 per cent of the former and half of latter are burned in open fields. Apart from ruining soils, this is a major cause of air pollution and emission of greenhouse gases, which impact cultivation and yields.
Similar to the trend in fertiliser application, the consumption of pesticides has also increased in
Incidence of cancer and other ailments have reached alarming levels and huge numbers of farmers and their families from the Malwa region regularly travel to Rajasthan for treatment of cancer. Newspaper reports also point to children as young as 10 looking old with peppery hair and suffering from arthritis.
Water-stressed
Planting HYVs has also increased the demand on water for irrigation. As per the State Department of Soil and Water Conservation, agriculture requires 43.7 lakh hectare meters of water. Surface canals provide 14.5 lakh ha-m and ground recharge supplies 16.6 lakh ha-m; the balance 12.4 lakh ha-m is met through overexploitation of ground water. As a result, groundwater levels are reducing by almost 30 cm each year. As per the Department's figures on its website, there are about 10 lakh shallow tube-wells and 3162 deep tube-wells in the State, mining water to irrigate a net area as high as 41 lakh hectares. All this notwithstanding the first "temple of modern
As per the figures of the Soil and Water Conservation Department, of the 17 districts in the State, groundwater in eight are overexploited, three are in the grey zone while the remainder fall are considered safe. If one were to look at the prevalence of crises in groundwater down from the district to the block level, almost 53 per cent of the blocks in the State are in the 'overexploited' category, eight per cent in the Dark Zone, and 16 more blocks fall in the Grey Zone, thereby leaving only 38 per cent of the blocks in the relatively safe White Zone. Clearly, this level of extraction is unsustainable.
Investing for debt
The Green Revolution also ushered in a rapid adoption of farm mechanisation technologies. To illustrate, on the one hand the average holding size is shrinking while on the other the sale of tractors is increasing. The State accounts for almost 14 per cent of tractors in the country, which is double the numbers that are actually required. This is nothing but overcapitalisation in farm mechanisation and its underutilisation which is adding to the debt burden of farmers. Increasing amounts of debt money is being spent on farm machinery, and this has increased from 15 per cent in 1997 to 53 per cent in 2008.
On indebtedness, a recent study by Dr. H S Shergill from the Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh, has tracked and analysed farm debt and come up with distressing figures: it has grown from Rs.5700 crores in 1997 to Rs.30,394 crores in 2008, a five-fold jump in a decade. The rate of growth of farm debt in the last 10 years for
What is equally shocking is that the debt amount as a per cent of net income has increased - from 68 per cent in 1997 to 84 per cent in 2008. The Shergill study points out that 72 per cent of farm households are heavily indebted while 17 per cent are virtually in a debt trap, unable to even fork out interest payments from their current farm income.
With the affluence of the farmer in
There still is time and opportunity to undo this industrial approach to farming and usher in an honest "Green" farming model in
(Bhaskar Goswami is with the