The monsoon bounty this year is expected to put the smiley back on the agriculture output graph. The government has quickly announced a target food grain production of 244.5 million tonnes for 2010-11, 10mt more than the highest till date – 234.47mt achieved in 2008-09. Even in the wake of last year's monsoon failure, wheat production in the rabi cycle breached the 80mt mark for the first time ever.
But are these recent successes signs of a much-needed turnaround or are they temporarily masking a larger crisis in Indian agriculture that has been limiting growth in the medium term and threatening our food security?
A revealing international study that used US satellite data to track year-on-year changes in yields, warns that environmental drivers could be pushing agriculture towards stagnation. The findings indicate that India's Green Revolution may have reached unsustainable levels, at least in some parts of the country, and may hit a wall unless massive policy interventions address the situation.
The paper, Decadal Variations in NDVI and Food Production in India, published earlier this year in the open-access Remote Sensing journal, compares agriculture production in two decades – 1982-92 and 1996-06 – and finds a distinct slowdown in growth rates in the latter decade for both kharif and rabi crops. The study points to two worrying environmental factors, among others, that may explain the low growth during 1996 to 2006 – increasing pressure on groundwater due to unsustainable use and rising temperatures in the subcontinent.
The authors, researchers mostly based in the US, used a measure known as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which calculates crop yields using satellite data. For the study, year-on-year data from the US meteorological sensor, the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer, was used.
As compared to the previous decade, the study found a 50% drop in growth rates in the kharif season during 1996-2006 and, more alarmingly, almost zero growth in the winter crop (rabi). The slowdown was more pronounced in the main foodgrain producing states in north India and in the central portion of the country.
"Around 30% of the total cropland area of India showed a statistically significant decline in growth rate of greenness index during the rabi season," lead author Cristina Milesi from California State University, Monterey Bay, told TOI.
The rabi slowdown is significant because it's primarily dependent on irrigation, increasingly, groundwater. Not surprisingly, states such as Punjab and Haryana where rabi yields are stagnating, also overlap with regions where groundwater use has reached critical levels. The paper estimates that in the absence of any irrigation, it would require 30% to 150% increase in local annual rainfall to sustain the rate of growth in rabi crops seen during 1982-2002 in large portions of peninsular India.
"Our calculations of increase in crop water demand are greatest over the northwest and central-southern peninsula and coincide to a good approximation with areas mapped as suffering from groundwater overexploitation," the paper notes.
Says K Krishna Kumar, climate scientist at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and one of the authors, "What could also be contributing to the fall in growth is accelerated warming since the mid-1990s. Our paper notes that over the past decade, average temperatures have increased by 0.25 degrees Celsius during the kharif season and by 0.6 degrees during rabi. We cite other studies which have linked the recent warming to a potentially reduced rabi crop yield by 6%."
Source: Times of India, 26-11-2010
But are these recent successes signs of a much-needed turnaround or are they temporarily masking a larger crisis in Indian agriculture that has been limiting growth in the medium term and threatening our food security?
A revealing international study that used US satellite data to track year-on-year changes in yields, warns that environmental drivers could be pushing agriculture towards stagnation. The findings indicate that India's Green Revolution may have reached unsustainable levels, at least in some parts of the country, and may hit a wall unless massive policy interventions address the situation.
The paper, Decadal Variations in NDVI and Food Production in India, published earlier this year in the open-access Remote Sensing journal, compares agriculture production in two decades – 1982-92 and 1996-06 – and finds a distinct slowdown in growth rates in the latter decade for both kharif and rabi crops. The study points to two worrying environmental factors, among others, that may explain the low growth during 1996 to 2006 – increasing pressure on groundwater due to unsustainable use and rising temperatures in the subcontinent.
The authors, researchers mostly based in the US, used a measure known as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which calculates crop yields using satellite data. For the study, year-on-year data from the US meteorological sensor, the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer, was used.
As compared to the previous decade, the study found a 50% drop in growth rates in the kharif season during 1996-2006 and, more alarmingly, almost zero growth in the winter crop (rabi). The slowdown was more pronounced in the main foodgrain producing states in north India and in the central portion of the country.
"Around 30% of the total cropland area of India showed a statistically significant decline in growth rate of greenness index during the rabi season," lead author Cristina Milesi from California State University, Monterey Bay, told TOI.
The rabi slowdown is significant because it's primarily dependent on irrigation, increasingly, groundwater. Not surprisingly, states such as Punjab and Haryana where rabi yields are stagnating, also overlap with regions where groundwater use has reached critical levels. The paper estimates that in the absence of any irrigation, it would require 30% to 150% increase in local annual rainfall to sustain the rate of growth in rabi crops seen during 1982-2002 in large portions of peninsular India.
"Our calculations of increase in crop water demand are greatest over the northwest and central-southern peninsula and coincide to a good approximation with areas mapped as suffering from groundwater overexploitation," the paper notes.
Says K Krishna Kumar, climate scientist at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and one of the authors, "What could also be contributing to the fall in growth is accelerated warming since the mid-1990s. Our paper notes that over the past decade, average temperatures have increased by 0.25 degrees Celsius during the kharif season and by 0.6 degrees during rabi. We cite other studies which have linked the recent warming to a potentially reduced rabi crop yield by 6%."
Source: Times of India, 26-11-2010
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