'Green Revolution' pioneer sees crisis in India's agriculture

Indian agriculture is heading for a crisis as food output stagnates and millions of poor farmers struggle with high debt and crop failures, the nation's foremost farm scientist has warned.
Economic growth averaging nine percent a year, fuelled by manufacturing and services, has masked the crisis in the countryside, said M.S. Swaminathan, who led the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s that made India self-sufficient in food.
"While the contribution of manufacturing and services is laudable, it is still the farm sector that provides the largest employment in the subcontinent," said Swaminathan, 82, who heads India's National Farmers' Commission.
About two thirds of India's 1.1 billion people still depend on agriculture for a livelihood and are being neglected in the euphoria of a surging economy, the scientist said in an interview last week in this southern Indian city.
At a conference in Visakhapatnam attended by Swaminathan and other scientists, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for a "second Green Revolution" using new technologies that are "eco-friendly, efficient, affordable and scalable" to boost food production and improve farmers' lives.
Farmers are a powerful voting block in India, where Singh's Congress party came to power in 2004 on a pro-rural platform amid perceived disenchantment over economic policies tilted towards industry and the cities. Swaminathan, a plant geneticist, spearheaded the first Green Revolution that began in the late 1960s, helping turn India from a starving nation into a food exporter.
Under the programme, recognised as one of the world's most successful agricultural turnarounds, the planting of high-yield varieties of wheat and rice resulted in a dramatic rise in food output. But Indian agriculture, hostage to the vagaries of the monsoon, has been in decline in recent years and is growing at less than a quarter the pace of the overall economy.
Annual per capita foodgrain production declined from 207 kilograms (455 pounds) in 1995 to 186 kilograms in 2006. The rate of agricultural growth fell from five percent in the mid-1980s to less than two percent in the past half-decade.
At the same time, thousands of debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide after crop failures forced many to sell plots held for generations. "Unlike in the 60s and 70s, when the first Green Revolution was ushered in, farmers of the present generation are a lot more pessimistic," Swaminathan said. "They are cynical and diffident about the way politicians and governments deal with them," he added.