In India and Pakistan, Grain Farmers Mean Business

Sudesh Pal Singh: He has a degree in mathematics but chose the fields of northwestern India over a faculty job.

Farmers Speak of Progress

Like farmers everywhere, those in South Asia complain about rising production costs and squeezed profits, but eventually they admit that their livelihoods are better than before. In the words of Chasan Veer Singh, a 53-year-old farmer from Sultanpur, Ghaziabad District, Uttar Pradesh, India: “Working conditions were much harder when I was young, before tractors. Things have changed since the 1960s, when the Mexican wheat varieties arrived. Back then there were no carts, roads, electricity—we did everything by hand. We never went hungry, but work was harder. Ladies used to grind grain and men chopped fodder by hand; now everything is mechanized. Previously people used to walk to other villages; now at least most families have a motor scooter.”

Agriculture: Subsistence or Profitable Sideline?

Many forces lie behind this progress, not the least being the productivity of rice-wheat rotations. New circumstances are putting hard environmental and economic choices to rice-wheat farmers. While some stand pat on tradition, many others, like Chasan, are risk takers. Says Chasan: “We must experiment to increase production.” 

Positive experiences with new technologies such as zero-tillage have recently gained converts to the “farmer-experimenter” fold. According to Khushi Muhammed, Sheikupura District, Punjab, Pakistan: “We depend totally on the grace of God, because otherwise we have nothing. But last year we saved some money and bought a zero-tillage planter. Now we’ll sow all our land under zero-tillage and on beds. We’ve left our traditional system behind.”

Conversation with farmer Pardeep Singh, of Matiala Village in Ghaziabad, India, is all business. “We have learned that, wherever you go, you can succeed with hard work,” he says. But Pardeep obviously combines work with clear vision. A Sikh who left Pakistan at partition and settled in India’s Punjab, Pardeep’s father moved to Ghaziabad in 1970 in search of land. He and his family restored and occupied a tract of saline soil that local farmers had spurned. Pardeep has since expanded his father's holdings to 20 hectares and is looking for more land. “In this way, I can make farm operations more efficient,” he explains. His medium-to long-term projects include diversifying away from intensive rice-wheat production. For the time being, Pardeep is experimenting successfully with zero-tillage and bed planting. He hopes that one day farming will be a sideline, rather than the sole livelihood, for his two school-age children.

Some farmers are taking advantage right now of opportunities to diversify, based on zero-tillage and bed planting. Sudesh Pal Singh, of Sultanpur Village, Uttar Pradesh, India, has about 3.5 hectares on which he grows a sugarcane-wheat rotation and a gram-sugarcane rotation, in addition to oats for fodder, to support the four members of his immediate household. Dairy production is a chief source of household revenue. The family has five milk buffalo, ten cows, seven calves, and one bull. Every day Sudesh’s oldest son goes out on a scooter to sell milk by the liter to villagers.

Sudesh and his family began experimenting with zero-tillage and bed planting for the first time in 2000,thanks to the extension work of R.K.Naresh, agronomist in the Uttar Pradesh Agricultural University extension agency, Krishi Vigyan Kendra. Sudesh is considering growing a crop of mungbean while the rattoon (the second growth of sugarcane) emerges. His main goal, however, is eventually to expand dairy production on his homestead.

Needed: Policies that Support Enterpreneurs

Not all farmers in India and Pakistan are so well off. According to a May 2001 article in The Economist, for example, around 25% of all farmers in India produce 60% of the country’s agricultural output. The remainder are either subsistence farmers or landless laborers. But agriculture in both countries has performed admirably in the past and is poised to serve once more as an engine of growth, if given the chance.

It is becoming apparent that policies to ensure national food security, once a force for progress, may now have exactly the opposite effect. Worse, these policies appear to exacerbate soil and water management problems, according to a recent article* by Prabhu Pingali, a native of Hyderabad, India, and director of the CIMMYT Economics Program, and Manishah Shah, former CIMMYT research associate. Among other things, Pingali and Shah argue that subsidies–such as “cheap” water, fertilizer, pesticides, and credit—have reduced farmers’ incentives for improving input-use efficiency:

“Techniques for improving fertilizer–use efficiency are available, for example, but will only be viable at the farm level when fertilizer subsidies are removed. The same is the case with the adoption of zero-tillage, integrated pest management techniques, or more judicious water management.”

Reforms suggested by other experts include new policies that allow farmers to consolidate fragmented land holdings, thereby making mechanization and other agricultural investments profitable. Finally, farmers need quality transport and storage infrastructure to diversify crops and access markets opportunely.

According to Mangala Rai, deputy director general (Crop Science) for the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and member of CIMMYT’s Board of Trustees, Green Revolution technologies have remained the cornerstone of the nation’s strategy for food security, health for all, rural development, natural resource conservation, and poverty alleviation. “During the Green Revolution era, technological change in agriculture arose from the introduction of one or more inputs, the costs for which were largely borne by the public purse,” he says. “In adapting to new resource-conserving technologies, the challenges are about changing mindsets and having farmers bear the capital costs of change. We have tilled soils too much for too long.”

Rai also cites weakened extension systems as having impaired, rather than encouraged, the adoption of knowledge-intensive agriculture. “Fortunately, the Rice Wheat Consortium’s farmer participatory approach has surmounted this obstacle,” he says.

Farmers in South Asia have already demonstrated their capacity for hard work and their willingness to change. Like managers of intensive cropping systems in other parts of the world, rice-wheat farmers possess a keen entrepreneurial spirit that perhaps has yet to be fully tapped. Asked what he likes about farming, Pramod Tyagi, of Bayana in Uttar Pradesh, India, answers: “Every crop that gives a good cash return!”

* See P.L. Pingali and M. Shah, “Policy re-directions for sustainable resource use: The rice-wheat cropping system of the Indo-Gangetic Plains,”  in P.K. Kataki (ed.), The Rice-Wheat Cropping System of South Asia–Trends, Constraints, Productivity and Policy (Binghamton, New York, Food Products Press, 2001).

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For more information: Michael Morris (m.morris@cgiar.org)

© CIMMYT October 2001

Annual Report 00-2001 |  Maize in the Developing World