Union Minister for Agriculture Radha Mohan Singh, will join his counterparts from various Asian and African countries to honour Prof. MS Swaminathan, eminent agriculture scientist, who turns 89 on Thursday. The ‘birthday boy’ has conceived an idea to make the world “hunger free” as well as “rich in nutrition”.
Promotion of family farming in a big way all over India and other hunger hot spots are the new offer by Prof Swaminathan. He claims that family farming offers an effective and economic solution to help meet the challenge of making sure that each person has access not just to calories but to nutritious food.
If the Tamil and Eelam chauvinists do not oppose the presence of I MN Chandrasiri, the deputy director from the Ministry of Agriculture, it will be a birthday celebration which would be a landmark event in the history of Indian agriculture as family farming is expected to get a shot in the arm.
Policy makers and agricultural experts from all over the world will have brainstorming sessions from August 7 to 10 at Chennai on the role of family farming in the 21st century . “We hope to come out with a Chennai Declaration on August 10 on how to meet the Zero Hunger Challenge by 2025 as envisaged by the United Nations. This will be a road map on how to eradicate poverty and make nutritious food available to all by 2025,” Prof Swaminathan, one of the founding fathers of the Green Revolution, told reporters here on Tuesday.
The four-day session is in the backdrop of the declaration by the United Nations that 2014 would be observed as the International Year of Family Farming. According to Prof Swaminathan, a shift has to be made from food security to nutrition security because ‘it has been found that improved diets and good health require bolstering nutrition’.
“The International Year of Family Farming is being observed in the backdrop of the 500 million family farms all over the world and the two billion people working in them,” said the agriculture scientist who headed the National Farmers Commission during the previous NDA regime.
He said family farming included all family-based agricultural activities, and was linked to several areas of rural development. “Family farming is a means of organizing agricultural, forestry, fisheries, pastoral and aquaculture production which is managed and operated by a family and predominantly reliant on family labour, including both women’s and men’s. Both in developing and developed countries, family farming is the predominant form of agriculture in the food production sector,” he explained.
He said many previous programmes conceived and executed to address the issue of under nutrition led to malnutrition. “Family farming is characterized by diversified crops and hence can be harnessed to support nutrition-sensitive agriculture. The steps needed to achieve such a change include survey and identification of the major nutritional problems prevailing in an area. Appropriate changes in crops to address the deficiencies can then be made on family farms,” he explained.