Study Suggest That the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Caused a Massive Disruption to Agriculture in India

India's agricultural system is mostly centered on input-intensive monocropping of basic crops.

According to a study published on August 18th in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation by Lindsay Jaacks at The University of Edinburgh, Midlothian, United Kingdom, Abhishek Jain at the Council on Energy, Environment, and Water, New Delhi, India, and colleagues, while COVID-19 disrupted agricultural labor, supply chains, and farmers' access to credit and markets, the pandemic did not significantly push Indian farmers to adopt more sustainable cultivation practices.

Disruption in agriculture in India due to COVID

(Photo : LAURENT EMMANUEL/AFP via Getty Images)

Despite the fact that agriculture employs over half of the Indian population, the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic on agricultural methods have not been adequately recorded, as per ScienceDaily.

Researchers contacted 3,637 farmers residing in 20 Indian states and union territories by phone between December 1, 2020, and January 10, 2021, to quantify changes in farmers' cropping patterns, input consumption, and adoption of sustainable agricultural techniques.

According to the study, 84% of farmers reported no change in crop type, and 66% reported no change in fertilizer or pesticide use.

However, the study has drawbacks, including low response rates in some important agricultural states and significant self-reporting bias.

"Contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find an association between COVID-19 and changes in crop cultivation patterns or interest in trying agroecological practices," the authors write. "However, while most farmers continued to grow the same crops with no change in input use, many expressed an interest in learning more about practicing more sustainable farming."

"Despite disruptions to agri-food supply chains during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, and about one in every five farmers in our national sample reporting COVID-19 symptoms in the past month," Jaacks continues, "the vast majority of farmers continued with prevailing cropping patterns."

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Agriculture in India

While agriculture's proportion of the Indian economy has gradually dropped to less than 15% due to the rapid rise of the industrial and service sectors, the sector's importance in India's economic and social fabric extends far beyond this metric. For starters, over three-quarters of Indian families rely on rural income, as per World Bank.

Second, the majority of India's poor (about 770 million people, or around 70%) live in rural regions. Third, India's food security is dependent on expanding the output of cereal crops as well as fruits, vegetables, and milk to fulfill the demands of a growing population with rising incomes.

To accomplish so, an agricultural industry that is productive, competitive, diverse, and sustainable must emerge quickly.

India is an agricultural powerhouse on a global scale. It is the world's greatest producer of milk, pulses, and spices, as well as the largest cow herd (buffaloes) and the largest area under wheat, rice, and cotton cultivation.

It ranks second in the production of rice, wheat, cotton, sugarcane, farmed fish, sheep and goat meat, fruit, vegetables, and tea.

The country has around 195 million ha under agriculture, with approximately 63 percent being rainfed (nearly 125 million ha) and 37 percent being irrigated (70m ha). Furthermore, woods cover around 65 million hectares of India's geography.

Raising agricultural production per unit of land: Because practically all cultivable land is farmed, increasing agricultural productivity per unit of land will need to be the major engine of agricultural expansion.

Water supplies are likewise restricted, and agricultural water must compete with growing industrial and urban demands.

All productivity-boosting strategies must be used, including improving yields, diversifying to higher-value crops, and building value chains to cut marketing costs.

Rural poverty must be reduced by a socially inclusive policy that includes both agricultural and non-farm employment: Rural development must help the poor, landless, women, reserved castes, and tribes.

Furthermore, there are significant geographical disparities: the bulk of India's impoverished are concentrated in rain-fed areas or the Eastern Indo-Gangetic plains. It has not been simple to reach out to such organizations.

While progress has been achieved - the rural poor population declined from about 40% in the early 1990s to around 30% by the mid-2000s (approximately 1% per year), there is an obvious need for a quicker reduction.

As a result, poverty alleviation is a major pillar of the government's and the World Bank's rural development activities.

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