Ploughing a new channel for India’s food systems

#AGRICULTURE

■  Ploughing a new channel for India’s food systems-

✅Efforts are being made to spur national and regional action to deliver the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through transforming food systems

✅Recently, the UN Food Systems Summit took place which called for action by governments in five areas: nourish all people; boost nature-based solutions; advance equitable livelihoods, decent work and empowered communities; build resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stresses; and accelerate the means of implementation.

✅Such a transformation in the Indian context would involve enhancing interfaces between the spheres of science, society and policy, focusing on sustainability, resource efficiency and circularity.

● India’s journey to food security:

✅India’s Green Revolution in the 1960s, enabled food security and addressed widespread hunger and poverty.

✅It was achieved not only through science and technology and the development of improved high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat but also through policy measures and development of institutional structure.

✅It included a vast agricultural research and technology transfer system at the national, regional, State and local levels.

✅The Training & Visit (T&V) system introduced in the 1970s with World Bank assistance was key to the science-society interface as it established a cadre of agriculture extension specialists at the local level.

● Ground reality of India’s food security needs:

✅India is now self-sufficient in food grains production in the macro sense. However, it has about a quarter of the world’s food insecure people, a pointer to the amount of food necessary to allow all income groups to reach the caloric target (2,400 kcal in rural and 2,100 kcal in the urban set-up).

✅Nutrition indicators have marginally improved over the years. However, macro- and micronutrient malnutrition is widespread, with 18.7% of women and 16.2% of men unable to access enough food to meet basic nutritional needs, and over 32% of children below five years still underweight as per the recently released fifth National Family Health Survey (2019-2021) phase 2 compendium.

✅India is ranked 101 out of 116 countries in the Global Hunger Index, 2021. Not surprisingly, widespread concerns about poverty, malnutrition and the need for a second Green Revolution are being made in tandem. The country faces the dual challenge of achieving nutrition security, as well as addressing declining land productivity, land degradation and loss of ecological services with change in land use.

● Steps needed to overcome the associated challenges:

✅The siloed approach of ‘agriculture’ serving ‘food security’ needs must give way to ‘food systems’ for ‘sustainability’ and ‘better nutrition’ and

✅It must embrace the range of activities and actors involved in food production, aggregation, processing, distribution and consumption embedded in their socio-economic and physical context.

✅In the context of the intensifying economic, environmental and climate challenges and crisis, the need of the hour is a good theory of transition encompassing the spatial, social and scientific dimensions.

✅It must be supported by policy incentives and mechanisms for achieving a sustainable, resilient and food secure agriculture.

● Enhancing sustainability:

✅An agro-climatic approach to agricultural development is important for sustainability and better nutrition.

✅Harnessing the spatial diversity of agricultural production systems adopting the principles of sustainability, resource efficiency and circularity could correct the limitations and unintended consequences of the Green Revolution.

✅These are the loss of indigenous landraces, soil nutrients depletion, groundwater stress, excessive use of agrochemicals and its residual presence in foods and environment, income gap between large, marginal and small farmers, and the gap between irrigated and rain-fed areas.