Doing by learning
To fight rising food prices,we need to address the deficit in agricultural R&D.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently flagged the need for rapid agricultural growth — a subject that tends to surface in the news when there are strong inflationary trends in food prices. Unfortunately,inflationary trends in agricultural commodities are here to stay. As spendable incomes expand,either through welfare programmes or through real jobs,the first priority of people is expenditure on food. In the case of the urban middle class,there is an increase in demand for diversity in food — more fruit and vegetables,more milk and meat. Meanwhile,the Indian population continues to grow and will stabilise at around 1.6 billion. Thus more food will have to be produced in a scenario in which land resources for agriculture are shrinking,water resources are under stress,soil health is deteriorating due to erosion or continuous cereal-based cropping systems,and yields of most crops have been stagnating since the mid-1990s.
All the current debates on food availability and prices revolve around quick fixes. The element which is missing in the current debate is India’s poor performance in agricultural research and development. Regrettably,we are not a very R&D-oriented country. The best brains want to be managers who would run others’ lives rather than sweat it out as R&D experts. The worst performance in R&D happens to be in agriculture.
The first damage to agricultural research was done when stand-alone agricultural universities were created after Independence,inspired by the US’s land-grant universities. Nobody cared to note that though these US schools were world leaders in agricultural research at that time,they were not stand-alone agricultural schools. In the early years,our stand-alone agricultural universities played a vibrant role in expanding the green revolution,but since the mid-1980s,shorn of interdisciplinarity and expertise in new tools of biology,they have lapsed badly. Whatever potential there is gets snuffed out through political interference. In the late ’70s our Central planners began getting disillusioned with agricultural universities and created institute after institute under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) to achieve more focused planning in agriculture. ICAR documents list 49 institutes,17 national research centres,25 project directorates and altogether a total of 175 organisations and programmes along with 589 Krishi Vigyan Kendras under their control,besides 46 agricultural universities under control of states. Huge investments are required merely to keep these institutes going.
One can almost sense a conspiracy of silence on R&D in agriculture. The mainstream science community believes that agricultural R&D is a weak and primitive science. The fact that agricultural R&D has fallen off the radar in developed countries reinforces this belief. What is not realised is that developed nations are either exporters of food or importers by choice. Their populations have stabilised and these countries do not have to contend with millions who are hungry and millions who want access to better food.
Most of our science bureaucrats in agriculture were exposed to breeding research at international institutions like CIMMYT in Mexico and IRRI in the Philippines,but we never followed those successful models. Instead of opting for a critical mass of competent scientists,we went for numbers,fragmented sub-critical programmes and appointment of research leaders by seniority rather than merit. Most of the major breakthroughs in Indian agriculture,including the green revolution,came from CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) institutions like the IRRI and the CIMMYT and from the global open source that existed about 20 years back,but has been dying out after the Bayh-Dole Act in the United States that seeks protection of intellectual property produced by publicly funded systems.
Globally,most of the R&D on crops is with the transnationals. The big three,Monsanto,DuPont and Syngenta,control around 50 per cent of the global seed market. Most of the small breeding companies have been bought out. For India,one way to go is to make the investment environment more attractive for big companies so as to bring their expertise to breed specifically for India’s requirements. However,under the current laws,farmers are allowed to keep their own seed. It will be difficult to excite these companies to invest in pulse crops,soybean,groundnut,wheat and rice and other self-pollinated or true breeding crops. Most of the commercial activity in India by the private sector is centred on hybrids since,by the very nature of hybrid seed,farmers have to procure fresh seed for every new sowing.
The other option is to bring about a major transformation of the public-funded agricultural R&D,like in China. Both China and India benefited from the green revolution of the ’60s. China surged ahead in the ’80s with a second green revolution through hybrids and better varieties,after initiating its hybrid rice programme in 1965. In 2008,the yield of rice in China was 6.8 tonnes/hectare compared to India’s average yield of 3.4 tonnes/hectare with similar acreage under assured irrigation. Due to the enhanced productivity of cereal crops in China,millions of hectares of land have been released from cereal production and brought under fruit and vegetable cultivation. China is now planning a third green revolution through investments of around $3.5 billion in GM technologies to enhance both yield and environmental sustainability.
This drift and complacency can only be plugged by the political establishment. The last time this was done was in the ’60s when C. Subramanian took the decisive step to import dwarf wheat to India,a technology that brought about the green revolution and saved millions from starvation — in spite of the scientific establishment in agriculture dragging its feet.
What we require today is not apologies but ambition,an ambition to double our agricultural production by 2025,as well as our production of milk and meat. For vegetables and fruit,the increase has to be four times the present production. This can be achieved only through an overhaul of publicly-driven agricultural R&D and participation of the private sector in both breeding and seed production. We need to create a cadre of agricultural scientists who have a background in genetics,genomics,molecular biology and biotechnology. Available technologies,new S&T requirements and human resource requirement for each crop and livestock species will have to be mapped. Existing talent will have to be used more imaginatively. In the new scheme,scientists rather than science bureaucrats will be the focus.
The most uplifting aspect of technology is that it empowers people and provides opportunities that welfare measures can never match. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has exhorted the scientific establishment to work for a second green revolution on many occasions,but I doubt if any creative plan has surfaced. We need to act immediately. The food deficit cannot be met without tackling the R&D deficit.
The writer is professor of genetics and former vice-chancellor of Delhi University
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