Subscribe
With rheumy eyes and a face wizened by the sun, Yankappa Karbari looks down to the ground, and then, slowly, up to the skies. This year, his village Bettatur in arid Raichur district of north Karnataka received rains before the arrival of the monsoon. The district recorded above-normal rainfall in May, triggering unprecedented farm activities; Karbari sowed cotton on his 2-hectare (ha) land. But since mid-June, the ground has remained parched, with no signs of livid clouds on the western horizon. On July 14, when Down To Earth (DTE) spoke to Karbari, the farmer in his mid-50s said that the saplings would die if it does not rain in another week. Data with the state agriculture department show that farm activities across Raichur have stopped since the beginning of July in the absence of rain. “It’s a repeat of last year’s kharif season, when I lost 90 per cent of the crop and could not even recover the sowing cost,” says Karbari. In 2023, owing to deficit rainfall, the state government declared 95 per cent of the talukas (administrative division of a district) drought-hit. This included talukas in Raichur.
Halfway across the country in Punjab’s Bhatinda district, 68-year-old Swarn Singh from Karmgarh Sattran village knows well how to juggle risks, from unpredictable weather to frequent pest attacks and crop diseases. But he has given up hope after repeated crop damage in the past few years. “In March 2023, my entire 2 ha of gram, wheat, mustard and fodder were damaged by unseasonal hail. I had never seen such giant hailstones in my lifetime,” says Singh. Media reports estimate the hailstorms impacted 40 per cent of wheat sown in Punjab that season. In 2022, a sudden rise in temperature in March, a month before harvest, led to shrivelled wheat grains. “I also lost cotton crop to pest attacks,” says Singh. This year, for the first time, he has not taken up farming.
Consecutive, large-scale crop losses, triggered by unpredictable and extreme weather, are becoming increasingly common as the planet, in the words of the UN secretary general António Guterres, enters the era of “global boiling”. The latest Global Climate Risk Index, prepared by Germanwatch, a non-profit headquartered in Bonn, identifies India as among the seven countries that suffered most from extreme weather events during 2000-19. In 2022, shows an analysis by DTE, India experienced extreme events on 314 of the 365 days. The number increased to 318 days in 2023.
This is alarming as agriculture employs 42.3 per cent of the country’s population and has a share of 18.2 per cent in its GDP (gross domestic product), according to the “Economic Survey 2023-24”. Almost 70 per cent of the rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, with 86 per cent of farmers being small and marginal (owning less than 2 ha). Every extreme weather event brings these farmers closer to the edge.
Furthermore, 55 per cent of the country’s net sown area is watered by rain or not watered at all. These rainfed regions, says a 2022 report by the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, meet 44 per cent of the country’s food requirement and support 60 per cent of the livestock. This means, a substantial part of the country’s food security and the livelihood of 61 per cent farmers who rely on rainfed agriculture depends on whether the rain arrives at the right place at the right time in the right quantities.
To assess the impact of climate change on agriculture and farmers, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has conducted modelling studies for 573 rural districts. Its latest 2019 assessment shows that 90 per cent of the districts face climate risks. As many as 310, or 54 per cent, of the 573 assessed districts face “high” and “very high” climate risk (see ‘Districts at climate risk’, p25). The study identifies rise in minimum temperature, high frequency of droughts, low access to irrigation and cyclones as some of the factors contributing to climate risk in agriculture, and warns that the yield of several crops would significantly reduce in the absence of any adaptation measures (see ‘Vulnerable to warming’,).
In the last couple of years, there have been massive crop losses due to erratic and extreme weather conditions.
In what appears to be a desperate attempt to make farmers climate-resilient, ICAR on July 15 has signed memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with Syngenta Foundation India and Syngenta India Pvt Ltd—offshoots of Swiss agriculture technology company Syngenta. As per a statement by ICAR, the collaboration “aims to enhance training and capacity-building programs for farmers and rural youth, focusing on Climate Resilient Agriculture practices”.
In fact, over the past few months, ICAR has signed several such MoUs with agribusiness companies such as Bayer, a global enterprise with core life science and agriculture competencies; Dhanuka Agri tech Limited, an agri-input company in India with products ranging from herbicides to insecticides to plant-growth regulators; and Coromandel International Limited, an agri-solutions provider that has been in operation in India since setting up the country’s first fertiliser plant in 1906 and makes products like phosphatic fertiliser and neem-based bio-pesticide apart from marketing organic fertiliser.
Farmer unions, agricultural scientists and members from civil society groups have expressed concerns about the collabo rations. On July 20, over 450 individuals have written a letter of objection to ICAR, asking the government to suspend the MoUs, make their details public and not to sign more such MoUs without debates.
They point to conflict of interest in these collaborations. “Global agribusiness players have different sets of aims. Bayer, for example, is involved in research tailor-made to promote the marketing of products from pesticides to hybrid and genetically modified seeds,” Soma Marla, former principal scientist at ICAR-National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, Hyderabad, tells DTE. According to a statement by ICAR, its partnership with Bayer “aims to improve farmers’ livelihoods by providing them with agronomic solutions, crop protection, mechanization for Direct Seeded Rice [DSR], and precision tools for water-positive practices”. Bayer mentions on its website that it provides tailored solutions for farmers using “regenerative agriculture” so that they can plant, grow and protect their harvest using less land, water and energy. DSR, when compared with the traditional method of raising the seedlings in a nursery, helps conserve water and reduce emission of methane, a major contributor to global warming. But Marla says the practice is taxed with excessive weeds in paddy fields, and here, Bayer could promote its herbicides.
The website of Syngenta also refers to practices like zero tillage, as part of climate-smart, resilient agriculture. But zero tillage, in which the crop is sown directly into soil, if practised in a chemical-based approach will lead to more weedicide use. Usha Soolapani, an agro-ecologist from Kerala, fears that ICAR’s collaboration with agribusiness firms would allow them to promote more agro-chemicals in the name of climate-resilient agriculture as the use of weedicides is known to produce super weeds and pesticide use is known to result in pest outbreaks.
Experts also fear that the collaboration would allow the private firms to utilise ICAR’s vast network of Krishi Vigyan Kendras or KVKs (agriculture extension centres) to further their own interest. Some corporations have been under scrutiny in the past for peddling products hazardous to health and the environment. One of the Bayer’s products is glyphosate-based herbicide. India allows the use of glyphosate only in tea plantations and non-crop areas for control of weeds, citing health hazards for humans and animals. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, France, classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. Pesticide “Polo” manufactured by Syngenta has been accused of causing a spate of pesticide poisoning deaths in 2017-18 in Yavatmal, Maharashtra.
While details of the MoUs remain unknown, the move by ICAR reflects why farmers continue to suffer despite scores of initiatives being implemented to make India’s agriculture climate-resilient.