The Andhra Pradesh (AP) model of natural farming has the potential to employ twice the number of farmers than industrial agriculture, thus reducing the overall unemployment rate, while also increasing farmers’ incomes by 2050, an analysis led by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), along with the AP state government, built on what agriculture, land and welfare might look like in 2050 in the state.
The analysis, called Re-thinking food systems in Andhra Pradesh, India — How Natural Farming could feed the future, was a part of ‘AgroEco2050’, a collective future-building exercise engaging scientists, farmers, policymakers and institutions, by the AP government, French agricultural research organization CIRAD and FAO.
Under AgroEco2050, the aim was to quantify two different visions of what agriculture and food, along with land, nature, jobs and incomes in Andhra Pradesh might look like in 2050.
One vision was based on the intensification of conventional industrial farming, while the other was based on taking natural farming (agroecology) to scale. The goal was to compare and understand the implications of these two different pathways and verify their coherence.
According to this analysis, by 2050, natural farming would employ twice the number of farmers than industrial agriculture (10 million farmers versus 5 million farmers) and would be profitable for farmers due to less production costs (seeds, chemicals, irrigations, credit, machineries) and better market value remunerating high-quality produce.
While the number of farmers became half of 2019, the unemployment rate in industrial agriculture scenario in 2050 increased to 30 per cent. At the same time, in the natural farming scenario with more farmers (10 million), unemployment decreased to 7 per cent.
In addition, the income gap between farmers and nonfarmers would be narrowed significantly under natural farming — from 62 per cent in 2019 to 22 per cent in 2050. The 22 per cent income gap is almost half of the income gap of 47 per cent calculated for industrial agriculture in 2050.
AP launched Zero Budget Natural Farming in 2016 as an alternative to chemical-based and capital-intensive agriculture, through its implementing agency Rythu Sadhikara Samstha, a non-profit established by the state’s agriculture department.
This scheme, which was later renamed Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming, aims to cover six million farmers over six million hectares.
In terms of nature and biodiversity benefits and reversing natural resources degradation under natural farming, the total cultivated area would be 8.3 million hectares (ha) in 2050, against 5.5 million ha with industrial agriculture. This would happen as regenerative and agroecological practices under natural farming would reverse land use constraints and desertification trends.
With more land under production, natural farming would produce more and better plant food per capita (5,008 kilocalorie / day) than in industrial agriculture (4,054 kilo calorie / day), despite slightly lower yields per hectare.
The yield increase in natural farming would be less but much better balanced in macronutrients and richer in micronutrients and fibre, with zero chemicals (fertilisers, pesticides) and no antibiotics.
The report highlighted that the scenarios were based on application of existing knowledge of macroeconomic structural transformations and current best practices which were fed into an interactive interface.
“AgroEco2050 views quantitative models as an inclusive and participatory endeavour. Most modelling exercises run as magic black box where a small group of academics choose scenario variables, parameters and functions to optimise through complex mathematics,” it said.
“This approach allowed for a creative collaboration among a diverse group of stakeholders, from India and abroad (scientists, farmers, government, civil society and private sector) through multiple workshops from 2019 to 2023, bringing their unique knowledge and visions to the table, enabling an exercise in participative democracy,” the report added.