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Garma
Garam
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Agriculture |
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VI.
Future Strategy and Policy Suggestions
Punjab farmers have made high
level of investments in agriculture due to which any activity having
low level of outturn, despite high rate of profitability over
variable costs, would not find favour with the farmers. Therefore,
only those enterprises can compete with the existing ones whose
value productivity is high. Second peculiarity of Punjab agriculture
is that due to strong infrastructural network and high exposure to
mass media, high competitive spirit and innovativeness of the
state’s farmers any potentially profitable enterprise gets quickly
adopted by large number of farmers which results in glut in the
market leading to violent price crash when the commodity is not of
importance for mass consumption. Keeping these two characteristics
in mind, the state should follow three types of diversification;
one, through items of mass production and consumption; two,
concentration on area specific enterprises of moderately high value;
and three, limited diversification through non-conventional high
value items of elite consumption. The enterprises in the first
category, whose production should be encouraged at small scale but
throughout the state, include milk (dairying), pulses, oilseeds.
Since these are the items of importance to masses and there is wide
and growing gap between their availability and requirement, even
large increase in their production can be absorbed. Objectives of
diversification through these enterprises are to increase crop
diversity, make production broad-based, ameliorate environment, ease
the strain on natural resources, and reduce ecological degradation. The second category should
include moderately high value commodities like vegetables, potato,
onion, cotton, basmati rice and sugarcane. These enterprises should
be carefully earmarked for different agro-climatic sub-zones based
on the comparative advantage, and different activities should be
encouraged in different areas to avoid production gluts and price
crash. Main objective of diversification through this type of
activities is to enhance farmers’ income and to provide growth
impetus to the economy. The third type of diversification
strategy should focus on items like floriculture,9
exotic vegetables, mushroom and alike crops. Most of these
commodities involve high use of capital and high risk and their
marketing generally requires locating suitable buyers and some sort
of contract with the buyers. Secondly, demand for these commodities
is very narrow and they being highly perishable and sensitive
require special arrangements for transportation, packaging and
storage. No doubt domestic as well as international demand for such
commodities is becoming buoyant but the entire demand can be met by
production by small number of farmers. Therefore, these enterprises
should be encouraged at the fields of select farmers, who possess
the risk bearing ability and entrepreneurial ability to explore and
locate the markets/buyers, and who can carefully schedule supplies
to match the demand. For a fairly long time, farmers
in the state have been used to produce for assured market, facing
little market risk. The producers have to be prepared and trained to
produce for market based products. This also imposes heavy
responsibility on the state to develop an efficient system of
marketing and to develop commodity specific marketing
infrastructure. Despite lot of interest and
discussion on diversification, no serious efforts have been made to
identify and encourage area specific activities. General type
recommendations are being made for whole of the state. There is a
need to identify area specific enterprises taking into account the
groundwater status, soil health and other micro characteristics of
different regions. This way, specialisation pockets should be
developed rather than emphasising many things for each area. The
advantages of developing specialisation pockets are: (i) these are
useful in harnessing advantages of scale economy and (ii) it is
easy and less costly to develop infrastructure to boost one or a few
rather than many commodities. The two aspects which need
immediate attention and which are vital for long-term growth are (i)
public investment in agriculture and (ii) R and D in agriculture.
Two decades ago, Punjab invested about Rs 319 crore annually or Rs
768 per hectare (at 1980/81 prices) for agricultural infrastructure
which is one of the contributing factor for high growth of
agricultural output during the 1980s.10 As can be
seen from Table
9, public investment in the state plummeted to Rs 365 per
hectare during the late 1980s. Expenditure on public investment in
real terms has declined at the rate of 2.65 per cent per annum
during the past two decades which is highest among all the major
states. As a consequence of sharp decline in public investment in
the state, the infrastructure like rural roads and markets are in
bad state. It may sound incredible that lot of paddy crop in the
state markets this year has been spoiled by rains, causing huge
losses to the farmers because proper market yards for keeping the
produce were not available in most of the markets. In order to
create favourable condition for long-term growth, the state should
step up public investment for improvement in agricultural
infrastructure. The second aspect relates to
technology. Though it is acknowledged that the potential of existing
technology has been almost exhausted, the state agricultural
university, which has a glorious history of ushering in green
revolution in the state, has not been able to develop new technology
to break the ceiling of old technology. It is a great challenge to
the agricultural scientists of PAU to harness the potential of much
talked bio-technological techniques and evolve new crop strains and
varieties to meet the twin challenges of growth and sustainability. The R and D in the state has
focused mainly on wheat and paddy. Efforts should now shift to new
and emerging crops and enterprises of future importance.
Establishment of agro-based industries of small and medium size in
rural areas away from urban places can be of great help in creating
employment for rural youths and to encourage diversification. Due to high level of crop
intensity and high proportion of net sown area in geographic area,
changes in crop pattern can ease the strain on water resources to a
limited extent. Simultaneous efforts are needed to accumulate the
small savings in water wherever possible. The possible measures
through which demand for water can be reduced are (i) proper pricing
of water resources to put a check on indiscriminate and excessive
use of irrigation water, (ii) creating awareness among the farmers
about the long-run repercussions of depletion of water-table, (iii)
research on crops/varieties and water management techniques which
can result in water saving, (iv) check on paddy transplanting
during the month of May and early June, (v) adjustments in cropping
pattern, (vi) incentive for use of irrigation devices like drip
and sprinkler, etc, (vii) augmenting supply sources, (viii)
discourage cultivation of crops like sunflower which are grown
during peak summer, and (ix) confining sugarcane production only to
those areas where symptoms of negative water balance are not there. Dairying is the best choice for
agricultural diversification in the state, on ecological as well as
economic grounds. It has vast potential for growth in employment and
income and for restoring soil health. Efficient and modern system of
marketing and processing is required to give boost to dairy industry
in the state. Source: Economic and Political Weekly
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