Suman Sahai
I traveled to Ludhiana
not so long ago to deliver a lecture at a well known academic institution
there. My talk was about how climate change threatened our agriculture and food
security and how urgently we needed to make agriculture sustainable. The
discussion threw up many predictable responses about how taking steps towards “sustainable”
agriculture would reduce farm incomes and could not be done. The farmers of Punjab
are on a treadmill of targeting higher and higher yields, with no intention of
getting off , never mind the cost. Their scientists are not giving them much
help either, to break from destructive practices and get off the poison path.
The Punjab
farmer is self destructing and harsh as it sounds, the cause is his greed, his
unwillingness to settle for less. For the last 50 odd years, the farmers have
mined all the nutrients from Punjab’s soils in
unrelenting cycles of wheat followed by rice, followed by wheat cultivation.
The non stop two and even three crop cycles per year ensured that the soil was
never allowed to recover, yoked as it was to constant output. When all the
nutrients got used up and the organic matter disappeared from the soil, the
amounts of chemical fertilizers put into the soil, rose steadily every year,
killing any semblance of natural
biological balance in the soil. The soil became hardened and died because all
the good bugs and friendly worms that keep the soil alive and healthy, fell
prey to overdoses of chemicals. When that happened , the application of urea ,
phosphates and potassium (the prescribed NPK
formula) increased even further and the dead soil became merely an inert matrix that held the chemicals which
the growing plant could suck up.
If the
fertlisers killed the soil, the chemical pesticides slowly began to kill the
farmers and their families. Enough has been carried in the media about the horrific
phenomenon of the Cancer Train, the Abohar- Jodhpur passenger that takes cancer
patients to Bikaner for treatment .
Dealers of seeds and chemical inputs are selling ever increasing amounts of
pesticides. In Abohar alone, dealers sell about 500 litres of pesticides every
day. The tragic result is that there are on average, four to five cancer
patients in every village in this region. Children struck by cancer are being
taken for chemotherapy on the cancer train but the use of pesticides does not
stop. The farmers of Punjab cannot dream of giving up
the prosperity that their farms brought them, they do not seem to care about
the cost.
My exasperation
in the discussions with farmers there was with their attitude. True, debts are
mounting because of the resource intensive agriculture they practice but even
after seeing their families destroyed by disease and death, their attitude was
that there is no choice. The vicious cycle has to continue because the farm
must continue to produce more and more. Faced with such calamities as they are,
one would imagine they would have the courage to break with business as usual,
however hard that might be, and try to find a new way. But stepping back and
taking a cut does not seem to be an option. The land must yield profits and it
is expected of the government to find solutions.
One of the most
perverse developments in Punjab has been establishing rice as one of the two
principle crops of the region which is a semi arid region where no rice was
cultivated till well after independence. This region simply did not have enough
water. Rice is essentially a crop of the wetter ,eastern part of the country which
is also the birthplace of rice, its Centre of Origin. Then came the Green
Revolution with its high yielding varieties and the Punjab
farmer moved to make the most of this opportunity. Misled by their scientists
who should have known better and by their politicians , all of whom were sons
of the soil and should certainly have known their agricultural history, Punjab
adopted rice and cultivated it with ground water. Its political leaders
negotiated with Delhi that Punjab’s
grain would be lifted for the central pool , thus ensuring a market for the
produce.
Punjab
which has less than 2 percent of India’s
arable land, now produces almost fifteen percent of the country’s food grain.
This is achieved through a relentless
wheat – rice double cropping pattern, with no rest for the fields to recover.
There is a high, almost staggering level
of inputs which the Punjab
farmer pours into his fields in every crop cycle. This includes fertilisers,
pesticides and water. The use of water in this essentially semi arid region has
been a recipe for disaster but nobody in policy making seems to care or to have
the gumption to do some straight talking to the Punjab farmers
to move out of rice.
The water
guzzling rice, a crop which was not even cultivated in this area till 1950, and
should never have been allowed to be cultivated here, has become Punjab’s main
kharif crop, soaking up groundwater at unsustainable rates , as it provides a
large surplus for the central grain pool. Today, several studies show that Punjab
is overdrawing its ground water by almost 50 percent every year. The
groundwater is depleting rapidly, by as much as one meter every year in some
areas.
It is not just
the kharif rice crop, Punjab has for years cultivated
summer paddy which was planted in the blistering heat of summer much before the
monsoons came. This crop could only be cultivated with an almost criminal level
of groundwater use. Not surprisingly, this led to several blocks of groundwater
in the Punjab being declared ‘black’ or irretrievably exhausted.
It is only in the last few years that the cultivation of summer paddy has been banned in Punjab, due
to grave water concerns. It might have been done too late.
Punjab
farmers will have to understand the trap they have created for themselves by committing
themselves to the rice- wheat cropping patterns. They must work together with
scientists, policy makers and farmers from other parts of India,
to find solutions to the situation they find themselves in. Global warming and
climate change are all set to destroy the wheat crop over the next decades.
Wheat being an extremely temperature sensitive crop is particularly vulnerable
to temperature rise. Its productivity will decline unless temperature tolerant
cultivars are developed and deployed soon. This does not appear to be
happening, or at least not fast enough.
Diversifying
the crop base and the kinds of varieties deployed must assume urgency. There
can be no further cultivation of rice, not at least in the current manner.
Biodiverse agriculture resting on a broad genetic base and investment in
improving the severely degraded natural resource base must assume priority. Punjab
farmers will have to step back from the intensive, ‘without- a- pause’ type of
agriculture they have practiced these last 50 years and allow their land and
water to recover . If they can scale back and build a new model of agriculture
that is sustainable, they can enjoy a new lease of productive farming.
