Seeds of Resilience: Charting a Path to Sustainable Agriculture in India

Reinvigorated growth across agriculture and allied activities is critical towards realizing India’s goal of Viksit Bharat 2047. The agriculture sector currently supports the livelihood of over 130 million farmers and is not only responsible for food security of 1.4 billion Indians but also plays a critical role in the global food basket, with over $50 billion in food exports annually across cereals, meat, spices and other commodities. That said, the sector is at significant risk due to the adverse effects of climate change. In 2022, with an increase in temperatures across the central Indian belt, wheat crop saw an estimated 5% drop in production. In the following year, the harvest period for the same crop coincided with excess and unseasonal rainfall. Interestingly, many current agriculture and food production practices also contribute to core sustainability challenges. Agriculture consumes over 80% of India’s freshwater reserves, soil erosion is a growing concern across key landscapes, and on-farm emissions from crop production and dairying contribute to 14% of India’s GHG emissions (the second largest, after energy consumption). This is due to current farm practices – such as flood cultivation of paddy and low levels of productivity in the dairy sector resulting in more (methane-emitting) cattle needed to meet milk demand. Some of this is further exacerbated by distortions driven by the agricultural subsidy regime – India’s N:P:K (Nitrogen: Phosphorus: Potassium) application ratio is 8:3:1 vs. recommended levels of 4:2:1 and Nitrogen use efficiency is less than 35% vs. global benchmarks of over 75%.

While the immediate impacts of climate change are significant, the cost of inaction could be far worse over the next two to three decades as weather conditions, water availability and soil health decline. A key need of the hour is building a sustainable and resilient agriculture sector – one that not only withstands the impacts of climate change but also lowers its contribution to climate change – while securing food production and ensuring continued livelihood support for the farm ecosystem.

This will require a concerted effort at all levels – across policy, capital, innovation and last-mile action.

Evidence-backed roadmap
First, India needs an evidence-backed roadmap to build a more climate resilient agriculture system. Today, with the available data and sophistication of AI models, the government is well poised to set up a future-ready decision support unit and control tower for climate action in agriculture within ICAR. Its core function can be to marry data about future weather patterns, ground water patterns and soil strata to predict cropping patterns and productivity over time. Additionally, this can also model the socio-economic and macro-economic outcomes, that are needed to more closely inform the policy pathways for building a sustainable food system. This information can be made available as a digital public good, with the right data and analytical models exposed via APIs to aid private sector actors such as NGOs advising farmers on cultivation or companies planning their future supply chain investments or DFIs looking to support these actors with building climate-resilient infrastructure. Agricultural research and innovation
Second, this evidence base needs to dovetail with the agricultural research and innovation agenda more holistically. For example, responding to the recent heat-related challenges, in the past ICAR has been extremely quick to produce new wheat seed variants. A forward-looking 5-year research map defining core goals and areas of focus, such as lower-water paddy, heat-resistant wheat, and high-yielding fodder seeds, can go a long way in building climate resilient agriculture ecosystem. This can serve as a guideline not just for public institutions, but also for the private sector and startups who can then be supported with commercialization of these innovations. Additionally, many climate solutions continue to emerge from the ground-up. We now have the opportunity to build a “Climate Solutions Hub” whose role is to identify these local innovations, conduct the right impact studies, document the contexts and agroecological zones in which they can be successful and hence build an ecosystem around scaling these up via improved financing, manufacturing, extension etc.

Building the right ecosystem around the farmer