Agriculture in a time of climate change, erratic rains, natural disasters etc!
For every one, individuals and people alike?
Yes, such questions are not asked everyday and everyone at that!
For the simple reason we live at a time when the rest of the world is preoccupied with more self-related questions. Money earning, job securing and running about our own day to day issues like personal happiness or personal anxieties and concerns. Right now of course we are caught in the life threatening Corona Virus and its many much more mutant variants and we can’t wake up and feel relaxed or secure in the day when more bad news come long with the many issues grappled with by our leaders’ own prognosis for the day or days ahead.
Unfortunately, our leaders and policy makers are not so reassuring, given their own limitations, limitations brought about also by everyday narrow concerns. Of course, the time is a democratic time and there are issues with a world that in the name of democracy has led to an anarchistic ways for doing things and solving the issues.
As we write there are Wars and destructions in Congo, Syria and Afghanistan and elsewhere, right now in the Israel-Gaza fronts and it becomes frightening to see so much bombing and fires and much else. There is a latest report, on the internal displacement of peoples within their own countries and, large and small. Even within China there is such an unprecedented displacement of people inside the country.
There is a latest report from Geneva, from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), according to which, in its latest annual global report a record of 55 million people within China, are now living away from their homes! Within their own countries there are floods, storms, protracted violent storms and floods new conflicts and natural disasters.
The Geneva-based Norwegian Refugee Council oversees the IDMC and while IDMC looks after the vulnerable people, the IDMC is also committed to the plight of the other vulnerable people who are exposed to mass movement of the refugees and other migrants, among whom we have to put other vulnerable groups.
The director of IDMC Alexandra Bilakk says it is about all else the problems of climate change is the villain which creates so much instability and the intense cyclonic, storms lead to so many disasters and destructions which arena quite a familiar occurrence almost many times a year.
It is the explorations of natural resources that lead to the climate change and warming of the planet.In India one of the main reasons for the climate change is the over exploitation of natural resources, be it oil, water or coal and other natural resources.
As we are seeing in the Corona Virus Pandemic the people at large, the general public are totally indifferent and insensitive and we don’t care for the diminishing water resources or other such valuable resources. One such diminishing resource is food! Many International agencies, not just the UN agencies alone, have warned of the diminishing food resources, we are warned, a fifth of it is lost to climate change alone!
The UN’s World Food Programme warns of a looming catastrophe the agency further warns that about 34 million people on the brink of famine! These background information, the latest on the world’s famed Cornell University Journal, Nature, Climate Change, warns. How far the Indian policy makers know of the seriousness on the Indian agriculture front? There are many reasons to feel unhappy without policy makers. What new policy initiatives we have heard recently from the Indian establishment?
None, none at all! Instead we see the prolongation of a massive farmers’ protest hanging fire for months! Is this policy making for a sector that had made India proud. We are today the world’s number one rice producer and exporter! Yet, our per capita income is only one eighth of the China’s farmer!
However, we see so much disregard for the feelings of the poverty-hit farmers community. The problems of the Indian farmers are too many and it is not the place here to discuss them. India has perhaps the largest small, micro farmers who own the minimum per head acres of farm land. We need radical ideas and sciences to lift our farming standards to world levels.
Highly qualified persons, in knowledge and experience, more and more high committed individuals must be put in charge of the Krishi Bhavan.
Let us hope there is a very fast change of heart to meet the kissed and lift up their spirits. Jai Kisan, Jai Jawan!