Food, Agriculture and Information

Food, Agriculture and Information

A Small Holder Farmer's Field in Aravalli Hills in Rajasthan India

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Steeply rising food prices have caused protests and riots in more than 30 countries in recent months. This has alarmed not only the world media but also national politicians and global leaders who all of a sudden talk in public about a topic they all shunned in the past, agriculture.

Various causes have been attributed for public consumption to the rise in food prices across the world. These include drought in Australia and North America, converting corn into bio-fuel for automobiles, rising consumption of growing populations, increase in incomes in countries with rapid economic growth for livestock products which are produced by feeding animals with food grain.

However these causes are not fully attributable to the food crises. Take rice for example. Drought may have affected rice production in Australia and, to some extent, global rice availability for export. Rice is still not a feedstock for Biofuels and the per capita consumption of rice cannot have doubled in the same time period that rice prices have doubled. Rice polish and bran are fed to animals, not rice grain.

Some agricultural experts have pointed out that agricultural productivity has not increased in rice producing areas. Some state that there is stagnation in agricultural productivity and some alarm us with statements about falling productivity. As data indicates, this may all be true.

We must try and look at the root causes of why global and national food availability is now in a crises. One of them could be that an agriculture that was high input based was brought about in the last century. This did result in high outputs and a sense of security regarding food availability but this approach may have been an unsustainable in the long run.

The rises in the cost of oil and fossil fuels in recent months have forced a rise in fertilizer, pesticide and energy costs for agriculture. For millions of small farmers in the main rice and wheat growing areas of Asia who have changed to the high input-high output systems it is just not economical now to cultivate these crops.

In the so called green revolution in agriculture in Asia, agricultural growth was supported through a policy of subsidized input of fertilizers, pesticides, water through irrigation or cheap energy for irrigation pumps, seeds, assured prices and free extension which provided new information and knowledge for the new high input-high output agriculture. This helped Asian farmers cope with the high cost of inputs and make farming a sustainable livelihood. In the 1990’s, under pressure from global policy institutions, this support structure for farmers was slowly dismantled. Among the earliest of the structures to deteriorate was the agricultural extension.

Global policy institutions also embarked on propagating more open global trade in agricultural commodities forcing a highly competitive, market oriented agriculture. This brought to the fore the need for new information to compete because markets are not only exchanges of commodities but also information about the commodities. Unfortunately for the millions of farmers, mostly small holders, in countries whose economies were largely agricultural and who had not invested in telecommunication and enabling access to information for farming, this was the initiation of a death knell for their livelihoods. Starved of the required information and knowledge to participate in a globally competitive agricultural market, these farmers have tried to adjust their productivity to what they could cope with and try and sustain their livelihoods and to some extent their own food needs. But this is a losing battle for them.

Stagnant and decreasing productivity is the first indicator of a global brewing storm or farm, rural and national food crises. In some countries, such as in India, large scale rural to urban migration with farmers opting out of agriculture, fallow lands and farmer suicides are symptoms to increasing magnitude of a highly diseased agriculture.

The healing of agriculture in my humble opinion has to include how new information and knowledge required to make agriculture sustainable in the broadest meaning of the word can be infused in agricultural systems across the world. I believe that agriculture development will continue in a path that is increasingly market oriented and globally competitive. And I also believe that agriculture will increasingly become, because of this market oriented path for its growth and development, knowledge intensive. Access to information and the ability to learn from it by those involved in agriculture and its progress and development has to be a part of the solution. In my future blogs, I shall try to relate my learning and experience on how new information and knowledge can be infused in agricultural systems so that they can be more productive and profitable to all involved in agriculture and food production.