India should use G-20 Presidency to rebuild food security, agri narrative

The day the agriculture deputies assembled in Indore for the first Agriculture Working Group (AWG) meeting as part of India’s G-20 Presidency, I was asked by a prominent TV Channel as to what I expected from the four rounds of deliberations expected on agriculture and food security during the year, before the baton is passed on to Brazil.

I made it abundantly clear that the G-20 Presidency provides India a unique opportunity to showcase its immense strength in agro-ecological farming systems and thereby help forge cooperation among G-20 nations to move towards climate resilient agriculture.

Considering that 2023 is the international year of millets, an exposure to millet magic will encourage G-20 countries to shift the focus from wheat, maize and paddy monocultures to the wonder crop of the future. At the same time, the tremendous tenacity demonstrated by rural communities to protect, preserve and conserve traditional seeds lays the foundation for a food secure planet.

Instead of focusing on corporate control over food, being aggressively pushed in the name of digitalisation, artificial intelligence, transgenic crops, gene-edited crops, robotics, and data algorithms, the G-20 countries can provide the world with saner solutions to combat climate emergency, as well as to limit the massive destruction of natural resources that intensive agriculture has already pushed the world into. With agriculture being held responsible for a third of the global Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, the challenge is to move away from food systems transformation that the transnational corporations are coming up with (one that UN Food Systems Summit recently endorsed), and instead transient towards time-tested and ecologically sustainable regenerative farming systems.

The Agriculture Revolution 4.0 that the world is looking forward to, and which the G-20 agriculture leadership also appears geared up for, is short of any real and meaningful idea to mitigate the climate change impact on the farm sector.

The primary reason behind this misadventure is the continuing drought of ideas that the policy makers in G-20 countries live with. They copy and paste the tested and failed economic thinking that has devastated agriculture in developed nations. Thanks to protests by Indian farmers, the government was compelled to withdraw the three contentious farm laws. Left to the bureaucracy, including a dominant section of economists and scientists, it would have inflicted the same flawed market reforms in Indian agriculture that have in reality decimated the sector in the developed countries.

Climate smart agriculture does not only mean financing farmers with high-tech solutions in the name of adaptation measures to mitigate climate impact. At a time when the Global Biodiversity Framework has set a target for reducing risk from chemical pesticides by 50 per cent in the next seven years (2030), some agencies are pushing for more use of pesticides. They use the same emotional argument of reducing pesticides would mean an increasing threat to food security whereas the reality is that the world already produces almost double the quantity of food that is required to feed the eight billion plus on the planet.

The urgent need is to reduce the global food wastage, which alone accounts for nearly a third of the food produced globally going into landfills. I wish the G-20 AWG agrees to launch a ‘zero food waste’ programme. By 2030, these economic giants can spearhead a food security programme based on reducing food wastage.

That carbon credits is one way to achieve green agriculture too is a misnomer. It, in fact, strengthens corporate control over agriculture. A study by the non-profit Grain, entitled ‘The corporate agenda behind carbon farming’ tells about how selling carbon credits are a lucrative business for some global giants, while effectively expanding their control over farming.

It would also be helpful if G-20 bureaucrats were to read a damming study by the ETC Group. The report entitled ‘Food Barons 2022’ is an eye-opener as it explains how digitalisation and shifting power is building a new class of food billionaires. With focus shifting to lab-grown meat and eventually to other foods, farmers are likely to become an endangered species in the years to come.

If the idea is to incentivise farmers to adopt climate smart agriculture, the G-20 should shift focus to expanding the area under agro-farming systems. Instead of subsidising the climate adaptive technologies that corporate come up with, the effort should be to incentivising farmers, who are open to adopt nature-based ecological farming practices. But just because the corporate are not saying this, the bureaucrats too fail to talk of what agriculture needs in reality.

When the fourth meeting of the G-20 Agriculture Ministers is held in Hyderabad in the second half of the year, I expect the Union Ministry of Agriculture & Farm Welfare will expose the ministers to what is perhaps the world’s largest agro-ecological farming switchover.

Andhra Pradesh is home to Community Managed Natural Farming (CMNF) programme that has already converted seven lakh farmers from chemical to non-chemical farming practices. It has set a target of converting the entire 60-lakh farmers to ecological farming by 2025-26. The initiative is being hailed as one of the six approaches globally to move towards climate resilient agriculture. The need is to incentivise these farmers. They already have made a shift to an environmentally-safe farming system that holds the future of farming.

I suggest India to invite an iconic seed saver from Deccan Development Society (DDS) in Telangana’s Zaheerabad to address the G-20 Ministers. Laxmiamma is a marginal farmer who holds a record of sorts by cultivating 92 cultivars in her two-acre farm.

Instead of harping on the same industrial agriculture formula that various international institutes and agencies have been furthering, the G-20 Presidency provides the right platform for India to rebuild the food security and agriculture narrative by building up an international alliance to shift towards a people-oriented agriculture that is environmentally sustainable and economically viable. It is also time to reframe the industrial agriculture supply chain narrative by debating and deliberating on how to guarantee farmers share in the value chain. Over the years, international agriculture value chains have miserably failed to benefit the farming community anywhere in the world. This has to change. Let’s not lose this chance. After all, it’s all about ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future.’

(The author is a noted food policy analyst and an expert on issues related to the agriculture sector. He writes on food, agriculture and hunger)