DRYLAND FARMING IN INDIA ROLL NO

I NDEXExecutive Summary 2 Introduction to drylands and their complexities 3 Understanding the problems of Drylands 5 Approaching the problem to provide “SUSTAINABLE” solutions 7 Providin

N ATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

TERM PAPER

Review of

SEMINAR,

2006

&

XAVIER INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT,

BHUBANESWAR

SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:

Prof Shambu Prasad Achin Bansal (05)

Amit Kumar (07)

I NDEX

Executive Summary 2 Introduction to drylands and their complexities 3 Understanding the problems of Drylands 5 Approaching the problem to provide “SUSTAINABLE” solutions 7 Providing sustainable livelihood to dryland farmers 9

Points of Analysis and Learning 17

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The paper takes a comprehensive look at drylands, the problems afflicting them, the challenges that the population residing in these areas face, the cyclical problem of poverty and deprivitation that the resident population has to face and the ways in which they are coping with it Further the paper tales a look at attaining sustainability

in regard to livelihood in the contours of these constrained resources The paper lays out some guidelines to achieve the goal of attaining critical mass regarding successful livelihood promotion in these areas

The paper also focuses on the lack of attention that the residents of these areas have got in both the public and policy domain It lays down certain guidelines to correct the inherent bias that the populations of drylands have had to face since decades

The paper thus takes an all encompassing view of the current situation, emerging perspectives and ways to attain success in tapping the limited resources that drylands possess

INTRODUCTION TO DRYLANDS AND THEIR COMPLEXITIES

Dryland agriculture is a commonly used term although there is not a common definition To many, dryland agriculture and rainfed agriculture are synonymous while others draw clear distinctions between them Dryland agriculture in this presentation is considered with all phases of land use under semiarid conditions except where irrigation is practiced Therefore, livestock systems, crop-livestock systems, and crop systems are all important components of dryland agriculture There are also different systems for defining semiarid areas but the aridity index where a semiarid area is one where the ratio of annual precipitation to annual potential evapotranspiration is > 0.20 but < 0.50 is used here Dryland cropping is the growing

of cultivated crops in dryland areas relying entirely on precipitation However, harvesting water from part of the land and concentrating it on another part of the land

is still considered dryland cropping The first and most important decision for producers in dryland regions is to decide whether or not land should be used for growing crops Clearly, many lands in semiarid regions have been utilized for cropping that resulted in serious land degradation Although these lands were usually not highly productive in their native state, they were sustainable with proper management In many cases, cropping of these lands could not be sustained because

of insufficient and highly variable precipitation that resulted in a rapid decline of soil organic matter and increasing wind and water erosion In some cases, when cropping was terminated and these lands were returned to grazing lands, they were less productive than prior to cultivation Water management is the most important factor for dryland cropping Every growing season is vastly different from the previous one

in terms of growing season precipitation and temperatures, but severe water stress is common in all years

Yields are highly variable and water supply usually limits yields to <40% of full

This section has been based on the article ‘RESEARCHING THE DRYLANDS’, SEMINAR, Vol No.564,

August 2006, written by Rajeswari S Raina, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Policy Research,

Delhi She is a rural innovation analyst at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi India and a LINK

associate She is an agricultural science graduate with a Ph.D in economics from the Centre for Development Studies, in Trivandrum Kerala Her work focuses on changes within science, policy processes and other socio-political factors that enable effective generation and utilization of knowledge for rural development

(water-unlimited) potential with grain yields commonly ranging from zero to three times the average The most important opportunity for improving water management

in dryland cropping systems is increasing the use of crop residues as surface mulch, but this is also the most serious constraint

It is a constraint not only because there is not sufficient residue produced in dry years, but in many developing countries, crop residues are commonly removed from the land and used for animal feed or household fuel In many developing countries, the rapid increase in population is closely linked to soil degradation and this is particularly true

in dryland regions The increased soil degradation, most notably the loss of soil organic matter, is also linked to an increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere that is generally recognized as a factor of climate change and global warming The loss of soil organic matter makes the severe lack of water for cropping even more limited because soil quality characteristics such as soil structure, infiltration rate, and plant available water capacity are all negatively impacted Maintaining or increasing the soil organic matter levels in dryland soils is critical Some scientists, particularly modelers, suggest that soil carbon can be restored to precultivation levels, and in certain circumstances to above them However, long-term studies in Oklahoma and Oregon showed that soil carbon in cultivated soils were increased only by additions of manure A drastic reduction in tillage is an essential part of any strategy for increasing soil organic matter in dryland regions No-tillage systems require added inputs, particularly herbicides and insecticides, and these are often too expensive to use in developing countries The possibility exists that concerns over global warming will result in incentives for producers to adopt practices that lead to increased amounts of carbon sequestration Such incentives might not be applied to dryland regions because the expected benefits would not be sufficiently large enough However, it may be advantageous for the world community

to invest in carbon sequestration in dryland regions Dryland regions are home to large numbers of poor people and they are custodians of globally important environmental resources Degradation of these lands will have a negative impact on the environment and the agricultural and biodiversity of ecosystems An increase in soil carbon storage could increase soil fertility, land productivity for food production and security, and prevention of land degradation

Some defining conditions for dryland agriculture are:

1 Uncertainty of weather conditions imposing multiple risks during the crop growing season

2 Low water potential

3 Low levels of fertility of the soil and increasing desertification

4 High intensity of livelihood dependence on the system, particularly of those who are below or near poverty line

5 Low levels of private investment and cultivation

6 Labour utilization in a pendulum manner vacillating between peak demand season and high unemployment seasons

7 Diversified farming systems as an ecological requirement

8 Traditionally recognized roles for women and livestock in agriculture

9 Dependence on collective action for maintaining the ecosystems- common lands, biomass and water

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEMS OF DRYLANDS

Drylands are the source of some of the gravest and most pressing problems facing India Yet they remain, since the history of independent India, as areas where the policy and public framework both are weak and the drylands emerge as forsaken entities in matters of consideration

In India drylands inhabit some 400 million people But, still they remain neglected This neglect has been perennial and consistent for a long duration of time Whether it was Government policy which stated that the route to mitigate poverty in such areas was shift to urban and industry areas, whether it was the Green Revolution which was

This section has been based on the article ‘The Problem’, SEMINAR, Vol No.564, August 2006 written

by Mihir Shah, Secretary, Samaj Pragati Sahayog, Bagli, Madhya Pradesh This NGO has for the last ten years carried out a large number of projects in the remote, tribal drylands of India, focusing on the 90 village tribal enclave in the Dewas District of Madhya Pradesh Their work has primarily centered around watershed development, but also embraces interventions in the allied areas of repair and maintenance of hand-pumps and mostly wells for drinking water, sustainable agriculture,

forestry, land rights, low-cost housing, women's empowerment, health care, sanitation and renewable energy.

conceptualised to bring benefits to only those who have irrigated lands or whether I was recognition in the public domain of the problems that people in this particular geography face

The Green Revolution’s extension into these areas has further compounded problems The Green Revolution which was already unsuited to conditions of Dryland agriculture further ended up in creating a crisis of plummeting water tables along with the continuing problem of poor agricultural outputs in these regions

The green revolution, intensive cultivation etc ensured national food security for the country and increased the production and productivity of various crops It also created serious regional imbalances in terms of resource allocation and use Much of the technologies, subsidies and public support systems provided under this undifferentiated agriculture policies fail in responding to the needs or problems of dryland agriculture, thus promoting iniquity, whether we examine inputs (fertilizers, seeds) or output (minimum support price and procurement price mechanism) A similar tendency is seen in terms of agriculture research priorities, technologies development and investments

The drylands in India have a unique characteristic in that they are bestowed with a lot

of diversity Sometimes this diversity can be so overwhelming that a micro watershed might also have differing characteristics Rainfall received, soil and rock type, slope contour, agricultural or pastoral, nature of crops that can be grown all have varied answers across the different multihued spectrum of drylands in India

This complicates the pre-existing problems to finding a solution even more Farmers’ suicides, starvation deaths, malnourished children, shrinking food stocks all are problems whose roots can be attributed to the problems of the people residing in these drylands These circumstances necessitate all the more the need to address this area even more pressing if ever there was some doubt in the need for action

The route to providing succour to the problems of the people and the terrain of these areas is through a long and arduous road The first thing that the people of theses

areas require is a voice to speak Since long they have been the marginalised and forgotten They need to be engaged in a dialogue, they need to be given the freedom

to air their views and be heard when they are speaking The people of this region on their fight to survive sometimes develop some of the most ingenious means of sustenance and harnessing their limited resources

Thus the people living here are the ones who have the best answers to the problems afflicting them They have to be facilitated and engaged in partnerships to succeed in the struggle to build sustainable livelihood in these Dryland areas

APPROACHING THE PROBLEM TO PROVIDE

Sustainability began as a vague concept applying only to the fields of fisheries and forests But today the concept of sustainability, its ambit and imperative of

applicability has expanded vastly With the diminishing natural resources the

challenge to attain sustainability has become even more critical

Originally, in the context of forests or fisheries, the idea was that these renewable biological resources grow in a stock-dependent manner Thus if one knows the natural growth rate for a particular stock size and harvests it at a rate less than or equal to this growth rate, then one will not deplete the stock as also ensure continued availability

of the resource for harvest at the same rate in the future First, ecosystems are

internally complex and interconnected entities, not simple bank balances that grow at fixed interest rates Within forests also exist pests; within fisheries also exist fish that are predators or prey of the harvested species of fish Sustainable use requires

‘adaptive management’, something that local communities may have been practicing

in the past (Berkes et al., 1994) but scientists are rediscovering now (Ludwig et al., 1993)

This section has been based on the article, ‘THINKING ABOUT ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY’

SEMINAR, Vol No.564, August 2006,written by Sharachchandra Lele, Senior Fellow and

Coordinator, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, ISEC, Bangalore

Second, external conditions can be quite variable Therefore, the focus ought to be not just on sustaining a particular level of production, but also on ensuring low variation

in that level from year to year Third, some have called into question the very notion

of aiming for steady (or low-variability) production levels (even after trial and error), when external conditions fluctuate tremendously For instance, the entire furore about overstocking of cattle in the rangelands of sub-Saharan Africa and resulting

desertification was built on the notion that rangelands have a natural carrying

capacity, which if exceeded leads to irreversible declines in their productivity Some scientists argue that, under such conditions, the resource manager should focus on

‘sustainability as resilience’, i.e., the ability of the system to recover from devastating shocks or stress as in the case of a severe drought year There is a raging debate as to whether reducing variability in the short-term may actually contradict efforts to increase resilience for the long-run (Ludwig et al., 1996) Finally, there may be situations where external conditions shift systematically rather than just fluctuate – as possibly the greenhouse effect might to do to our climate Under these conditions, what may be required to ‘sustain’ production systems is not just stability or resilience but adaptability

This debate about which temporal attributes to focus on has enriched, as also

complicated, the notion of sustainability Few scientists have been able to translate these abstract notions of low variability, resilience or adaptability into concrete prescriptions for specific ecosystems Furthermore, the response of modern

reductionist science to high environmental variability and complexity has been to control and simplify – setting up monocultural pine stands, single-species aquaculture,

or mono-specific cropping systems with irrigation and fertilization that overwhelms natural variability in rain or soils Analysts of dynamic systems have shown that in highly interconnected systems, small structural perturbations may result in wild fluctuations (Siljak, 1978) Building resilience into dryland agricultural systems against external fluctuations, whether major pest outbreaks or market crashes, might require them to be more internally diverse and complementary, and perhaps trading at multiple scales, not totally plugged into the global market

PROVIDING SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOOD TO DRYLAND

FARMERS

“To be a farmer living in the semi-arid regions of the developing world is to live with uncertainty and the constant fear of hunger.”

Indian agriculture is predominantly a rainfed agriculture under which both dry farming and dryland agriculture are included Out of the 143 million ha of total cultivated area in the country, 101 million ha (i.e nearly 70 percent) area are rainfed

In dryland areas, variation in amount and distribution of rainfall influence the crop production as well as socio-economic conditions of farmers The dryland areas of the country contribute about 42 percent of the total food grain production Most of the coarse grains like sorghum, pearlmillet, fingermillet and other millets are grown in drylands only The attention has been paid in the country towards the development of dryland farming Efforts were made to improve crop yields in research projects at Manjari, Solapur, Bijapur, Raichur and Rohtak An all India co-coordinated research project for Dryland Agriculture was launched by ICAR in 1970 in collaboration with Government of Canada and later Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA) was established at Hyderabad

Improved dryland technology:

Following are the various improved techniques and practices recommended for achieving the objective of increased and stable crop production in dryland areas

i Crop Planning: Crop varieties for dryland areas should be of short duration through resistant tolerant and high yielding which can be harvested within rainfall periods and have sufficient residual moisture in soil profile for post-monsoon cropping

ii Planning for weather: Variation in yields and output of the dryland agriculture

is due to the observation in weather conditions especially rainfall An aberrant weather can be categorized in three types viz

a Delayed onset of monsoon