Indian
farming and agriculture is at a crossroads.
The 1960s “Green Revolution” model of agricultural development has
exhausted itself and there are now no low hanging fruits left that
interventions like free irrigation and electricity, Minimum Support Price (MSP)
and new management responsive seeds could help harvest. The formal Government Extension system, one
of the major interventions of the “Green Revolution” has become decrepit and is
dysfunctional. Even the Government largely views, without explicitly saying so,
that it as a very costly albatross around its neck. The new agriculture in
India is increasingly market oriented and is rapidly diversifying. It is
demanding new technology and new structures and Institutions to deliver and support
this agriculture and the larger Agri-food system. One of these is the structure
or structures that deliver new knowledge and skills that market oriented
agriculture and complex Agri-food systems with international market chains
aggressively demand. What will be the contours of the new structure?
First of all, this new structure[1]
will need to provide information not only to farmers but also to all actors
from input suppliers to market intermediaries and consumers. It will need to rapidly process and
disseminate all market related information needed by actors in complex
Agri-food chains as also to its stakeholders such as the Government, formal
research and innovation institutions, financial institutions and trade bodies.
There will be a need for equity, balance, transparency and fairness in the
information flows it engineers, as Indian agriculture will remain for the
foreseeable future smallholder driven and these farmers are very vulnerable, if
not supported well information wise, in market oriented agriculture. This is
the main purpose, to support information access and use, of this structure.
Apparently this structure is addressing much beyond what is understood as an
Agricultural Knowledge and Information System (AKIS) as it goes beyond the
current definition of agriculture and its knowledge and information system.
It is apparent that the new structure will have to be pluralistic. Many
actors and stakeholders within the Agri-food system will be producers, users
and disseminators of data and information as nodes in a network. It will not be
limited to agricultural research and innovation and its extension to support
farmers with new technological packages of farm practice. This structure will
join all the actors and stakeholders and facilitate the flow of information in
the entire network. The structure will have elements of the government or
public sector, private sector and the community sector as its members and
participants, each contributing for its upkeep and function and sharing profits
and benefits that emanate from the particular niche the participating node
occupies in the network and system.
The information that flows within this new structure will optimize
profit with productivity, not only of the farmland but of all the resources
used by the Agri-food system including water, soil nutrients, energy, labor and
time and ensure safety, security and ethical production and use of its products
across the system as a whole.
A major function of this new structure will be building social
capital of the actors in the Agri-food system through continuous conversations
and enabling learning. A wide variety of channels both face to face and through
use of Information and communications technologies will be used for this
learning. This structure will leverage mass innovation brought about by this
democratization of learning that has so far been denied to the most critical
component of the Agri-food system, the farmer.
The type of learning that the structure will impart will be to
convert data into useful information and use it as knowledge. Since farming and
all other processes will be data driven, the new capacities needed would be
around managing and processing data into specific, context based information
and use it with experience to contribute positively to the Agri-food system.
This may also be largely machine mediated through big data analysis, heuristic
artificial intelligence systems etc. as this will be needed to solve issues
unique to each actor, primarily the farmer and small entrepreneur, in the
Agri-food system who all need a basket of options in the solutions they avail
from the structure. Only human mediated
systems such as the current Extension system have already been proven to be too
costly to be sustained and even if made possible in future will not be able to
provide the information and knowledge addressing the complexities in time.
Based on the above model, there will not be one type of Extension
agent as earlier envisaged and developed. Almost all actors in the Agri-food
system will also function as Extension agents processing information in their
own domains and sharing it with other nodes. Thus, these agents in addition to
their domain expertise will need capacities to process information contextually
to the larger Agri-food systems needs and communicate it effectively and
efficiently.
All this means that the days of the existing Agricultural Extension
System are numbered not only because the Government cannot fund it or manage it
but because it does not fit the aspirations and needs of the emerging complex
Agri-food system and its related economic sector.
So how will the new Extension System or the “Structure to support
data, information and new knowledge to Agri-food systems “emerge? This
structure is already fast emerging and its growth is very similar to how the
Internet has developed in so short a period of time. There already are various
patches serving new Agri-food systems that are organically trying to interact
and fuse with other patches in this function. For example, seed producers are
working with herbicide producers or co-opting them, fertilizer producers are working
with urban waste management organization and many a times all of them coalesce
into huge corporates such as of input suppliers eg., Bayer and Syngenta, Market
Intermediaries eg. Cargill or Supermarket Chains eg. Wal-Mart and Fast food
restaurants, eg. MacDonald’s. These organisations, realizing the new needs of
Agri-food systems, are also acquiring commercial organisations building
Agri-food systems data and information networks. Recently such an organization
affiliated to Google was sold for nearly a Billion USD to a major multinational
agri-business.
There is also a counter movement to this trend towards
corporatization of Agri-food systems. These are of independent farmers, farmers
markets, open information and technologies and community sector innovators and
information providers who form their own networks and use social media and the
Internet to share information, new knowledge and skills. The videos, for
example, on Youtube and Digital Green, the various Facebook accounts such as of
ISAP and the blogs on farming and agriculture are a testament to this movement.
The role of the government in this structure will be to create
policies, rules, norms, regulations, regulatory mechanisms, standards, new
institutions such as for basic research and innovation, data and information
infrastructure and structures for the networks to function similar to what the
Government is doing for Internet. The Governments policies will define whether
the overwhelming structure will be of the corporates, through the counter
movement of independent actors or a mix of both and letting the society decide
what is best for it.
India today is very well placed, by its rapid expansion in
infrastructure, business environment for start ups and the urgent need for
reforms in farming and agriculture to innovate agricultural extension
structures such as those described above and share it with the developing
world. However it is weak in the capacities needed to understand agriculture,
emerging complex Agri-food systems and the formal research, innovation and
extension systems that can act as mid-wives for this new structure to be born.
If India does not develop this new structure by the next decade, its
agriculture and farming, just as its current industrial sector, will be relegated
to a secondary economic sector, its food security threatened and its global
prestige diminished.
[1] I have no term for this structure yet. It is not Extension (of
research) as it is conventionally understood and it is not Rural Advisory
Services because it also addresses urban components of Agri-food systems.
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