With their agriculture income growing at a steady pace, Punjab and Haryana have emerged as the prosperous States of the country, with Punjab on top followed by Kerala and Haryana. This prosperity of the two States, according to experts, can be attributed to the use of new technologies including adoption of agricultural innovations by the farmers.
Agricultural experts, however, have a word of caution. The intensification of agriculture and the disproportionate reliance on irrigation and chemical inputs has led to environmental degradation and it is about time these states start exploring newer methods to sustain their leadership position as the supplier of food grain.
A media workshop organised by the Association of Biotech led Enterprises - Agriculture Group (ABlE-AG) in Chandigarh on Wednesday, looked at meeting its Food Security obligations through home grown food, the agri-sector leaders — Haryana and Punjab — need to accelerate and sustain the growth of food production and help India meet its Millennium Development Goal of reducing hunger in the country.
As one of the first States to adopt and implement the National Food Security Ordinance, Haryana has been on the forefront of ‘food for all’ initiative and needs to ensure adequate growth of agriculture produce to meet the needs of its 1.26 crore people, which is nearly half of the State’s population. “The current rate of growth in crop yields cannot help Haryana and the country to meet the challenge of doubling food production by 2020. Since we can neither increase the size of arable land nor improve quality of land and, it makes sense to adopt improved agronomic practices that can help increase yields significantly. Crop improvement through use of biotechnology can further increase yields by more than 50 per cent in near future and help us save costs and natural resources like water in a big way,” said Dr P K Khosla, Vice Chancellor, Shoolini University.
Pointing out that the region was already facing newer challenges like increasing labour cost, depleting water table, soil salinity, pesticide misuse and poor quality of inputs, the country’s leading agri-biotech scientists, here, stressed that it is imperative for the farmers of Punjab and Haryana to adopt new crop cultivars bred with Biotechnology. “Rapid crop improvement using genetic modifications (GM) is something that the country needs to seriously examine and adopt on a case by case basis at the earliest,” said Dr N Seetharama, Executive Director—ABlE-AG.