India’s prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh has given a call for a follow up second green revolution to the first one in the 1960s, which ushered in the much desired self-reliance in food for the country, writes Kunal Bose. In the first green revolution the focus was to make breakthroughs in rice and wheat by using high- yielding varieties of seeds and employing scientific agricultural practices, including rapid expansion of command area of irrigation. But the revolution now being planned with a very
substantial increase in R&D budget for the farm sector will give as much emphasis on oilseeds and pulses for which India is highly import dependent as on food grains. Earlier, in view of the country being dependent on imports for satisfying well over half its requirements of edible oils, on a much lower per capita consumption than now, New Delhi launched a ‘technology mission on oilseeds’ in 1986 with a view to raising productivity of oilseeds, promoting cultivation of non-traditional oilseeds and also popularizing tree- borne oilseeds.
While the technology mission has not yielded the desired results, its work supported by the National Oilseeds and Vegetable Oils Development Board has been able to break the stagnation in crop productivity. Even then, take any of the nine major oilseeds grown in India, the productivity is half or less than half of the world average. In recent years, the combined productivity of all oilseeds grown here has ranged from 995kg to 1,115kg a hectare. It is only because India grows oilseeds over 27m hectares that it remains the world’s fourth- largest producer of the crops after the US, China and Brazil. For nothing but the size of its population, India is the world’s second-largest consumer of edible oils and the biggest importer of palm oil.
Unlike in the early 1990s when acute shortages of foreign exchange pressured India to initiate economic reforms, funding imports of refined and non-refined edible oils at a huge outgo of money is no longer an issue with the country. Nevertheless, it does not speak well of India growing its GDP at close to 9% and its per capita use of edible oils set to rise rapidly to remain so overly dependent on oils imports. Demand for oils is generated as much by a growing population as by changes in food habits of the expanding ranks of middle class. Ashok Gulati, chairman of Commission for Agricultural Cost and Prices, which fixes support prices for different crops for a season, says, “the government should give same kind of preference to oilseeds that it gave to cereals in the past. India is short of oilseeds and farmers should be encouraged to produce more... Currently, the country has comfortable stocks of food. There is no compulsion or pressure on us at this stage to attract more land under cereals.” What is good for the future of oils industry in India that includes growing of seeds, their crushing and finally refining is the official admission that the “real deficit at present is in oilseeds.” This ground-level reality has led Professor Gulati to raise the question,“do we go on supporting the farmers in Indonesia and Malaysia or should we pay more to our farmers so that they grow more oilseeds?” He is unequivocal in saying that at this point “oilseeds remain our main priority.”
Ahead of every sowing season, Indian farmers will be exercising their commercial judgement as to which crops will get them optimum return. Keeping this native intelligence of farmers in view and also for the strategic purpose of incentivizing them not to move land from oilseeds to other crops, the government is fixing oilseeds support prices at levels which besides offsetting production cost rises on account of wages and farm inputs will give them a return between 20% and 30%. The Indian per capita consumption of edible oils is 13.8kg against the world average of 21.7kg. Dr B.V. Mehta, executive
director of Solvent Extractors Association of India, says stepping up production of oilseeds has become a priority in the context of per capita use of oils growing annually at 3% to 4%, making the country so much more dependent on imports.
The monsoon in India has so far behaved well creating favourable growing condition for crops. The initial oilseeds production forecast for 2011/12 (October to September) is 35.6mt (million tonnes), up 3% over last time. From this will follow edible oils production of 7.4mt in the season to start in October 2011 when consumption is anticipated at 17.1mt. The deficit is to be met by imports. As has now become the pattern, palm oil will constitute around 80% of Indian oils imports. Incidentally, Malaysia is the principal supplier of palm oil to India followed by Indonesia. In the last few years, however, Indian imports of soya oil and sunflower oil are also rising. In order to keep food inflation under control and also to encourage better use of local refinery capacity, New Delhi is allowing import of crude palm oil at zero duty while charging a duty of 7.5% on refined palm oil imports.
India grows its oilseeds twice a year- once during the monsoon and then in the winter. The principal growing states are Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Rajasthan. In the country’s drive to come increasingly closer to the level of average world productivity of oilseeds, an important task will be to get more and more oilseeds growing area under irrigation which now covers only 28% of the crop land. The regionally differentiated approach to growing oilseeds has done a lot of good to India making impressive progress in the cultivation of soybean in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. This needs to be pursued with greater application in coming times. An agriculture ministry official says that breakthroughs in crops productivity have finally got to do with “how much we are spending in fundamental research. We are spending 0.6% of agricultural GDP on agricultural research.This has to be enhanced two to three times by 2020. That will go a long way in our achieving a greater degree of self-reliance in edible oils.” In the meantime, it will be good for India to keep palm oil producers in Malaysia in good humour. Malaysia is providing technical know-how to India for growing palm trees in some select areas.