The New Bihar by Nicholas Stern

Author:Nicholas Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

Agriculture in the Time of Climate Change

M.S. SWAMINATHAN

ADDRESSING THE WORLD Climate Conference held in Geneva in 1989 on the theme, ‘Climate Change and Agriculture’ (Swaminathan 1990), I pointed out the serious implications of a rise of 1 to 2° C in mean temperature on crop productivity in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. An Expert Team constituted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in its report submitted in September 2009 also concluded that for each 1° C rise in mean temperature, wheat yield losses in India are likely to be around 6 million tonnes per year, or around $1.5 billion at current prices. There will be similar losses in other crops and our impoverished farmers could lose the equivalent of over US $20 billion in income each year. Rural women will suffer more since they look after animals, fodder, feed and water.

We are now in the midst of a continuous rise in the price of essential food items like pulses, vegetables and milk. The gap between demand and supply is high in pulses, oilseeds, sugar and several vegetable crops including onion, tomato and potato. Production and market intelligence as well as a demand-supply balance based on an integrated import and export policy are lacking. The absence of a farmer-centric market system aggravates both food inflation and rural poverty. FAO estimates that a primary cause for the increase in the number of hungry persons, now nearly a billion, is the high cost of basic staples. India has unfortunately the unenviable reputation of being home to the largest number of undernourished children, women and men in the world. The task of ensuring food security will be quite formidable in an era of increasing climate risks, stagnant farm productivity and degradation and diversion of farm land.

China has built strong defences against the adverse impact of climate change. China currently produces over 500 million tonnes of foodgrains in a cultivated area similar to that of India. Chinese farmland is, however, mostly irrigated unlike ours where 60 per cent of the area still remains rain-fed. Food and drinking water are the first among our hierarchical needs. Hence, while assessing the common and differentiated impact of a 2° C rise in temperature, priority should go to agriculture and rural livelihoods.

The year 2010 was the International Year of Biodiversity. We can classify our crops into those which are climate resilient and those which are climate sensitive. For example, wheat is a climate-sensitive crop, while rice shows a wide range of adaptation in terms of growing conditions. We will have problems with reference to crops like potato since a higher temperature will render raising disease-free seed potatoes in the plains of north-west India difficult. We will have to shift from planting tubers to cultivating potato from true sexual seed. The relative importance of different diseases and pests will get altered. The wheat crop may suffer more from stem rust which normally remains important only in peninsular India. A search for new genes conferring climate resilience is therefore urgent. We have to build gene banks for a warming India (Swaminathan 2009).

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