Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s mention of “zero budget” in farming when she announced the focus areas in agriculture while presenting her first budget has come at a time when a major report – Our Future in the Land – by RSA Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) set up in the UK has called for ‘unleashing a fourth agricultural revolution driven by public values’.
This is time for a historic drive to put health at the heart of our food system, the Commission observes, and adds: “All effort, policy, legislation, money and resources must be directed towards implementing and accelerating a transition plan for climate, nature, public health and wellbeing.” Reading the report, I realise it is also time for a historic transformation in India, to move away from intensive farming, which has led to soil degradation, water depletion, increasing desertification, environmental contamination and soaring diet-related illnesses. I am grateful to Nirmala Sitharaman for flagging a crucial issue which in all probability should assume a central role in the growth pathway that new India is trying to enact. If it fails, we as a society too fail to bring in a new agricultural revolution in harmony with nature and human health.
“Zero budget” as the name implies, is actually a system of agro-ecological farming that relies on locally available inputs, including urine and dung from local cow breeds, with emphasis on mulching and multiple cropping, thereby reducing the cost of production. Travelling through Andhra Pradesh where Subhash Palekar’s Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) is being practiced, I see healthy soil, healthy crop and healthy people. But that's wjhat I see everywhere agroecological farming practices are being followed. Let us also not forget there have been no farm suicide reported so far from areas where agro-ecological farming practices are being followed. The productivity of crops in the areas that have already been converted to ZBNF has not gone down, it remains more or less same and in many crops the yields have increased.
However, despite the claims, ZBNF is a collection of small farmer innovations that have evolved with time. As I said earlier, ZBNF is one of the effective ecological farming systems that have been developed. Agro-ecological farming in reality is a time-tested approach based on the location-specific technological innovations that small farmers have developed and perfected over the years. The late G Nammalvar from Tamil Nadu, Narayana Reddy from Karnataka, Bhaskar Save from Gujarat too have earned international recognition for their pioneering work. At the same time, there are scores of organic practitioners in different parts of the country who have successfully shown the non-chemical way in farming. Subhash Sharma (Yavatmal), Sarvadaman Patel (Anand), Manohar Bhau Parchare (Nagpur), Deepak Sachdev (Indore), Suresh Desai (Belgaum), late Surender Dalal (Jind), Amarjit Singh Sharma (Punjab), to name just a few. It is time to learn from all of them, and any research evaluating the performance of agro-ecology must include their work. Pushing in a monoculture in agro-ecology will be eventually regressive. Nor do I favour any cult building.
Earlier, Andhra Pradesh had experimented with non-pesticides management (NPM) which led to the formation of Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA). I thought it was a very successful agro-ecological model that extended to 36 lakh acres. As a result, pesticides consumption in Andhra Pradesh (before its bifurcation) had come down by 60 per cent. Surender Dalal’s innovative Keet Pathshala (Insect Classroom) had also reduced pesticides consumption in Jind district in Haryana. Similarly, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has vetted hundreds of such technological innovations in a series of printed volumes that continue to gather dust. Agricultural universities do have short term as well as long term studies on the efficacy and viability of agro-ecological farming systems, largely lying unnoticed, and the immediate need is to mainstream it.
Former AP chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu, remains a first in seeing the potential of agro-ecological farming. Beginning with CMSA, he was later drawn to the idea of zero budget, and had adopted ZBNF as a flagship programme, supported initially by a Rs 100-crore grant from the Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiative. Naidu had promised to bring the entire farming community, roughly 60-lakh farmers, under its fold by 2024. A laudable objective indeed, considering that shifting farming from chemical-intensive systems to climate resilient agro-ecological methods is the need of the times. I am sure if AP can make an attempt, the rest of the country too can. Himachal Pradesh is already on the path to agro-ecology. But as any programme grows in size, it does need additional finances. The point I am trying to make is that except for the name, there is no zero budget in farming. Even the farmers have to incur cost on raising cows, investing on farm labour required to undertake various farming operations and so on. But with no chemical fertiliser and pesticides being applied, the cost of production certainly is far less. This will certainly hurt the commercial interest of agri-business industry but I guess the fate of present and future generations is more important than the profit margin to people investing in stock market.
To say that agro-ecological farming systems do not need any price incentive is nothing but romanticism. As per the FFCC the era of cheap food has already led to a devastation of environment, human health and acerbated climate change. There is a cost for protecting the eco-system services, which has been denied to farmers all these years. In fact, the 2009 report of the International Assessment for Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), to which India is a signatory, clearly warns against business as usual approach.
Zero-budget farming. The Tribune. July 22, 2019
https://www.tribuneindia.com/
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