Don't make Punjab a junkyard for machines

Devinder Sharma

Food & Agriculture Specialist

At a time when farmers across the world are struggling to recover their cost of production, an Oxfam report says 62 new food billionaires have joined the super-rich club in the last two years. The report, of course, talks of 12 billionaires in the Cargill family, up from eight before the pandemic, to have jumped into the opulent bandwagon.

Riding on high commodity prices, soaring food inflation, record land values and a succession of technological innovations, all in the name of increasing productivity, the profits of the food industry are soaring. While Oxfam (Great Britain) Chief Executive Danny Sriskandarajah says: “At a time when hundreds of millions of more people are facing extreme poverty, there can be no excuse for governments not to address gargantuan profits and wealth in order to ensure no one is left behind”, what remains unexplained is why the roaring profits that the food supply chains ended up with did not percolate to the primary producer, the farmer.

After all, four grain-trading companies, including global giant Cargill, control 70 per cent of the international food trade. We know that the farm commodities being traded globally are produced by millions of toiling farmers who eventually fail to make a good living. In other words, the wealth that farmers produce is very conveniently sucked from the bottom to the top. Otherwise, I see no reason why farmers too should not be earning profits.

This is also true for the technology-rich companies which thrive on promoting technological fixes as the solutions to farming woes. While farmers struggle to eke out a living, stocks of technology companies stay bullish.

It is a wonder why despite all these technological innovations, industrial agriculture is blamed for generating a third of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, the real cost of producing cheap food has been easily externalised. While the input suppliers invariably walk away with profits, the society is left to bear the resulting economic and environmental costs. This cycle has gone on relentlessly. Let’s see how artificial intelligence (AI) tries to restore the balance.

This is a question that Rufo Quintavalle, a Paris-based private investor, asks in the very thoughtful essay Food Doesn’t Grow in Silicon Valley that he wrote for the Stanford Social Innovation Review (March 12, 2014): “The last hundred years have probably seen more innovations in the food system than any period in human history, and the common thrust of that innovation has been to drive down food prices, impoverish farmers, and degrade the environment.”

In fact, all technological innovations are aimed at improving efficiency and attaining high productivity. These technological innovations should also lead to higher farm incomes. But the fact remains that the more the farmers produce, the steeper is their income decline. Take, for instance, the case of North America. For over 150 years, despite achieving very high productivity, the wheat price for farmers, adjusted for inflation, has been on a steep fall. For example, compared to the market price that a wheat farmer in Canada is getting now, his great-grandfather would have earned six times more.

This draws me to Punjab, the frontline agricultural state of India. Despite achieving record annual crop productivity — amongst the highest in the world — Punjab has turned into an environmental mess. Technology did increase crop yield. Rather, in the bargain, excessive mining of groundwater has turned aquifers dry, chemical inputs have become extremely pervasive in the environment, soil fertility is declining and the burning of crop residues chokes the atmosphere. The food bowl has been left crying for a transformation towards a healthy and sustainable farming system.

Punjab provides an opportunity to understand how the politics of technology operates. The ongoing debate on saving groundwater reminds me of that time a few decades back when during a visiting assignment to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, I came across a study that said there was no difference in crop productivity if you broadcast the seeds or transplant the paddy seedlings. Intrigued by the findings and knowing well that broadcasting of paddy seeds was earlier a common practice in several parts of Asia, I posed this question to a top rice scientist. The response I received was something like this: “We were trying to help the tractor industry. After all, 97 per cent rice is grown in Asia and, perhaps, the change in cultivation practices was aimed at helping the tractor industry to grow.”

Another IRRI study showed that there is no difference in pesticide efficiency if you keep the pesticides at the source of irrigation flow in a crop field or if you use a knapsack sprayer with different kinds of nozzles to spray the chemicals. This was contrary to what we were taught as students.

With policy-backing, subsidies and availability of easy credit, farmers are being pushed to buy more machines. To illustrate, Punjab has five times more tractors than required. A former chairman of the Punjab Farmers Commission had asked banks not to extend further cheap loans for tractors. Also, in the name of checking stubble burning, more than 75,000 machines have already been sold. Coming in sets of five or six, these machines are used for a maximum of three weeks. As more technological gadgets and machines are promoted, farmers are increasingly sucked into a debt cycle, while equipment manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank.

It is not very often that a technology that does not require an equipment or machine to be sold is talked about. One is not against technology, but the question that crops up is why only a branded technological innovation finds favour. A simple but effective technology like the Nidana model that the late Surinder Dalal perfected against cotton pests, for instance, in Haryana has not found many takers for the simple reason that it doesn’t require any machine. The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) for paddy cultivation is another example. The list is long.

Mechanisation is certainly desirable. But in the process to modernise, we must ensure that Punjab does not turn into a junkyard for machines. The mindset has to change towards sustainable technologies that require less external inputs and fewer machines.

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