Do farmers eat fertiliser & other questions

Fertiliser demand has picked up from the 16 million tonnes. It was stagnating at to 21 million tonnes and the momentum should be maintained. In fact rising fertiliser off-take should have alerted us to the turn-around — farmers don’t eat fertiliser.

The fall in private investment in agriculture has been halted and there is reversal and there is data to the demonstrate that public investment in agriculture, corrected for stock changes, is also rising. Also the reversal in diversification seems to be behind us, with the non-grain crop sector and animal husbandry clocking fast growth again. So official energies shouldn’t get dissipated in crises theories. Business-like policies are required.

Assume that the loss in area sown is not to be reversed soon and that canal area is not going to rise. Assume also that plans for solving the groundwater crisis are going to take time to work. Therefore, growth has to emerge from technology, non-land inputs and diversification. And this has to be operationalised at the level of India’s agro-climatic resource regions.

The potential yields of the the 4,000-plus seeds the Indian Council for Agriculture Research has released are much more than the actual. The potential has to be actualised. The first major case this actualisation didn’t happen was hybrid paddy. This, I believe, was particularly unfortunate because it was the first case in which self-pollinated technology was to be supplanted by annual commercial purchases. Plus, the seed was developed as a public-private partnership. There’s little analysis of the failure.

Many years ago my friend Ricardo Petrella, in the first professional review of the new technologies, showed that biotechnology applications have three major requirements for success. First, the infrastructure should be there to cover the last mile of the supply chain. How do we deal with this? Take this example. Bharat Agro, the highly successful Bt cotton enterprise, was targeted by our regulators and fields of half a million farmers who bought the seeds were to be burnt down.

Second, Petrella said that successful innovations are those that are created on the corpses of the earlier efforts. Creative destruction is essential. But we regulate the sector to death, instead of encouraging short product cycles.

Third, Petrella said each innovation was multi-disciplinary. Some of the state agriculture universities played a major role in rubbishing the hybrid paddy technology — because others had collaborated in the research.

The first Indian to have patented a gene is my friend and successor at JNU, Ashish Datta, a star then from the School of Life Sciences, when I picked him up as Science Rector. The ICAR, the department of biotechnology and the university system in India will never collaborate, because official science is feudal in India and so agricultural scientists want a separate Genome Institute rather than working with the present one.

We have an excellent gene collection for good research. But our policy is genetically conditioned to ignore profit and demand while looking at research. Forget the West, China is racing ahead. We just worry and procrastinate.

The writer is chairman, IRMA and former Union minister of power, science and technology