Most agriculture methods in use right now will be rendered ineffective during extreme weather events—what is India’s plan?
“Earlier, the sight of rain soothed our eyes. Now, we just pray for it to stop.” Thus speaks a farmer in the Malayalam survival drama 2018 in one of the film’s most poignant moments after calamitous rains—heaviest in nearly a century—wreaks havoc in the state of Kerala.
The Kerala flood of August 2018 was a near-apocalyptic event. More than 400 people died. Entire towns were submerged. And thousands of acres of farmland went underwater.
Then came a drought.
Water levels in ponds and rivers sinked to their lowest levels. Many wells collapsed. The floods had washed off the topsoil in the hills, and they could no longer store rainwater.
Six years later, in the misty hills of Wayanad in east Kerala, rains struck again. This time the impact was localised; yet immense. Another 400 people died. Whole villages were lost without a trace.
Climate and the Crops
The floods devastated agriculture in the region. The worst hit was rice paddy. More than 26,000 hectares of farmland where rice was grown was inundated. Plantations of tea, cardamom, black pepper and rubber were destroyed following landslides in the districts of Nilambur, Malappuram and Kalikavu.
These events happened in Kerala. But the risks are present everpresent everywhere.
India experienced extreme climate events on 318 out of 365 days in 2023, according to a report by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a research organisation based in New Delhi.
A World Bank report in 2023 said rising temperatures and changing monsoon rainfall can cause India to lose 2.8% of its gross domestic product (GDP).
A World Economic Forum (WEF) report says India lost 33.9 million hectares of crops to excess rain and 35 million hectares to drought between 2015 and 2021. This in a country where agriculture employs 40% of the population, 70% among rural households.
When Disaster Strikes
Governments both at the Centre and states are waking up to these realities. In the Union Budget presented in July, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government is reviewing how agriculture research happens in the country and will realign it to create more climate-resilient crops.
The next month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spearheaded an event where 109 high-yielding, climate-resilient and bio-fortified crops were released. The seeds had been developed by the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) and were planted in the fields run by ICAR-India Agriculture Research Institute in Pusa, New Delhi.
Nabard, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, has been working on climate-resilient farming for since the past decade. In 2015, it set up a National Adaptation Fund for Climate Change (NAFCC) to meet the cost of adaptation to climate change. The rural bank has also led projects to restore degraded landscapes.
Raman Wadhwa of the Union Ministry of Rural Development said at an event on climate-resilient agriculture organised by grain commerce platform arya.ag recently: “The climate crisis is an urgent threat. The economic cost will be enormous if we don’t act.” Wadhwa thinks that the solution can be found in “cutting-edge technology” and calls for the building of regenerative agriculture and a climate-resilient food system.
The private sector, members of the academia and farmer producer organisations (FPOs) are getting involved and are trying to identify and counter the challenges facing agricultural sustainability. But farmers are lagging. A recent global survey found that while 71% farmers around the world were starting to feel the effects of climate change. But only four out of 10 Indian farmers are making changes.
Policymakers are broadly of the view that technology will lead the change. Farmers are not as optimistic. A report by Down To Earth published in August said that while farmers had benefitted from climate-resilient technofixes when they were helped by government agencies, they find the results difficult to replicate because the newer modes of agriculture require more money and a better understanding of technology.
Solving for Farmers
One of the ways to ensure more farmers use sustainable farming methods is to monitor seeds. Farmers say they find it difficult to get the right seeds from the market. Thus policymakers need to find ways to monitor the value chain from land testing to market links and work with all stakeholders in between.
Moreover, they need to establish a working feedback loop. Agriculture experts say that agencies promoting a certain kind of sustainable practice must check with practitioners (farmers) and ensure the risks of experimental agri techniques are not borne by the farmers.
“Adaptation is constant and applies universally, especially in the context of climate change,” says Siddarth Chaturvedi of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation, run by the Microsoft founder and his ex-wife, states it wants to support farmers and governments in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that are seeking a sustainable and inclusive agricultural transformation.
Reaching out and helping agriculturists is the only way for wider adoption of climate resilient agriculture. The Down To Earth report cited above also found that there are some approaches to climate-resilient farming that help the singular farmer make the entire region more vulnerable to climate risks. The transition to climate-resilient agriculture is demanded at a time the science is not all figured out. The only way Indians learn to make lunch that survives climate catastrophe is by getting all stakeholders involved while looking after the farmer.