Punjab must diversify crops or face crisis

NEW DELHI: How would you like it if, in the near future, fertile breadbasket Punjab turns into an arid tract of cactus fields? Wheat shortfall or not, a new International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) study has put out the red alert on the farm sector in the heartland of the Green Revolution. If Punjab doesn’t diversify urgently from wheat, and more so rice, the food bowl of India could well turn into a begging bowl by 2030.

Punjab’s agricultural economy has lost its place among the fastest growing in the country, surpassed by a number of other states including Karnataka, MP, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and W Bengal.

The study, “Withering Punjab Agriculture: Can it regain its leadership?”, done in August by Ashok Gulati, Ralph Cummings Jr and PK Joshi, has warned that Punjab is in the throes of a “serious” agricultural crisis. The state’s agriculture sector, the study maintains, has reached a point where it must make significant changes if it wants to move forward and regain its leadership.

Conversely, if it does not rationalise incentives and increase investments significantly, it will “suffer declining income and employment and irreversible environmental degradation” with a future that seems inevitable.

“All conditions favour Punjab to diversify but it is not happening as expected,” the study holds pinning the blame on policies offering the farmer high, stable returns for wheat and rice. The onus of food security should be grain management, the study holds, underlining that the heaviest burden for this should not rest on Punjab’s key sector.

Current policies have stressed out natural resources largely due to paddy cultivation. The result? Very low sustainability of agriculture with only marginal returns on fertiliser use at two kg of grain to one kg of fertiliser. The red alert in the study is in relation to Punjab’s key crop, cereals, with focus on paddy, particularly early sown varieties. If present trends continue, the proportion of blocks in Punjab falling in the critical level of water table is likely to increase from one-quarter (35 of 141) in 2000 to reach an alarming figure of half (72 in 2030). In the south western cotton zone, almost 16% of the net irrigated area is lost to salinity.

The study emphasises that indiscriminate subsidies on power and water cost the state government 6.8% of agriculture SDP compared to expenditure of only 1.9% (2.2% for all India) for public capital investment, the precursor of future growth and only 2.7% (lowest among agricultural states) for current expenditures which fund irrigation, research and extension and other key needs.

Thanks to the policies, yield of rice has almost stagnated in Punjab, going up only by 0.02% annually in the 1990s and wheat has slowed significantly (down from 2.96% annual gain in 1980s to 1.96% in the 1990s compared to all India average of 3.2%). Overall, the crop sector grew only by 1.3% per annum in the 90s compared to 4.8% p.a in the 80s. Rice production too has come at the expense of other crops.