India needs a new agricultural revolution to safeguard food security
India's farmers are finding it increasingly harder to coax yields from their fields, as soil stress and land degradation add to the challenges, they al-ready face in feeding a rapidly growing population in an age of climate change.
Nearly a third (32%% of India's land area is degraded while a quarter (25%) is undergoing desertification, the Food and Agriculture Organiza-tion (FAO) said in an article published last year citing reports.
Moreover, the country loses 5.3 billion tons of soil every year due to water and wind erosion according to the Indian Council of Agricultural Re-search (ICAR).
Soil stress, with the impact of the climate crisis only exacerbating it, is acting as a drag on farmland productivity, driving up input costs and weighing on farm incomes. However, most crucially, it is threatening In-dia's hard-won food security, with the country needing its farmlands to produce more food than they ever must feed the world's largest and yet still growing population.
Fortunately, there is hope. India's farmlands have not yet crossed the point of no return. The government, too, has actioned numerous initiatives over the years aimed at mitigating soil degradation from watershed manage-ment projects and the promotion of resource-responsible precision farm-ing techniques to the soil health card programme.
In the Global Soil Conference held in 2024, government representatives emphasised the need to address concerns surrounding soil health, in a sign that the highest echelons of government have taken note of the issue.
In fact, there is a National Soil Policy reportedly in the works. The draft National Soil Policy aims to provide an 'overarching framework for pro-tection, restoration, and sustainable management' of soils in India, in-volving scientists and farmers working together to develop practical solu-tions that can be implemented at the farm level.
There are a number of practices that can be actioned — and many already have — to preserve and even renew soil health. These include conserva-tion agricultural practices like zero tillage, which are already being prac-ticed to great success in countries like Argentina and Brazil, or regenera-tive and natural farming practices.
However, with soil renewal being a slow process and so much of our land area already degraded, we also need to equip our farmers to enhance productivity from already stressed farmlands, protecting their incomes in the shorter term, even as the process of soil renewal plays out.
Soil supplements and nutrients, that can make farming on stressed land less resourceful and water intensive without further damaging the soil, could hold the key.
As an example, UPL's Zeba is a naturally-derived, starch-based, super-absorbent product that increases the water-holding capacity of the soil, improves nutrient use efficiency in the crop's root zone, and has a positive effect on the soil microbiome, thereby maintaining and even improving soil health.
Its impact has been tangible — Zeba was used across 1.2 lakh acres of farmland across India in 2023 and saved 72 billion liters of water. It also led to a 25% reduction in fertiliser use while delivering savings of ₹1,500 per acre on electricity and ₹1,000 per acre on labor. In total, Zeba has earned the average farmer an additional income of ₹22,000+ per hectare on an additional spend of less than ₹5,000.
Zeba, to put it simply, has been a game changer. There are several other products out on the market today that are moving the goalposts in a similar way.
Promoted on a national scale, they could prove to be revolutionary. And that's what Indian agriculture needs — another revolution. The Green Revolution transformed our country from a food-deficient to a food-se-cure and even a food-surplus country. The Rainbow Revolution cemented those gains. In order to avoid squandering those gains we now need a new revolution for a new age. We need a soil revolution.
This article is authored by Ashish Dobhal, CEO, UPL Sustainable Agri Solutions (UPL SAS).
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