Cotton-Wheat Production System in South Asia: A Success Story and India.

In the past few years, much concern is being expressed on ‘Linking Farmers to Market’ – especially the LFM initiatives undertaken by NARS. Such studies have been promoted by FAO and the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR). APAARI, realizing the importance of LFM issues, organized an expert consultation in November 2006 at New Delhi, India, wherein need was expressed to identify some successful cases and publish them for wider use of NARS partners. The current publication is a follow up on these recommendations. It deals with three such success stories based on LFM initiatives undertaken in the Philippines, China and India.

Publication no. 2006/1
(pdf format, 668 KBytes)

Agriculture is the mainstay of the economy of many countries in the Asia-Pacific region as nearly 60 percent of its population derives livelihood from agriculture. The region has several hot spots of rural poverty, as most farmers in the region are smallholders with diverse farming systems, which are highly risk prone. In addition, these farmers have poor access to support services such as extension and the agricultural markets, knowledge, technology and financial credit. Obviously, a second “green” revolution is needed not only to produce more food in the region, but also to enable participation of its farmers more equitably in innovations and markets to reduce rural poverty, generate better rural livelihoods and maintain quality of life and environment. This second revolution could be termed as knowledge revolution and there are already some visible signs that Asia-Pacific rural agriculture is in midst of it. The new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are bringing about and sustaining this revolution by empowering the resource-poor farmers with up-dodate knowledge and information about agricultural technologies, best practices, markets, price trends, consumer preferences, sources of finance, weather, soil-moisture conditions and the environment.

Building upon a previous report on status of ICT in ARD (APAARI, 2004), this publication reviews the current state of telecommunication policy for rural and agricultural development, diverse applications of new ICT in rural farming areas of selected Asia-Pacific countries and identifies different models of such applications by analyzing the context of local situations. It also assesses the potential impact of ICT in agricultural development by describing two successful cases – one from South Korea and the other from India – where the potential of ICT is harnessed for the benefit of small farmers. The South Korea case is a NARS initiative to provide agricultural information services using state-of-the-art ICT to more than 100,000 farmers and extension agents per month. While the Indian case is a 5-year old private sector intervention being scaled up to empower 10 million farming households by providing them access to up-to-date farming knowledge from experts and universities, and real-time information on markets, prices, weather, etc. Both the success stories have certain common elements such as the recognition of information and decisionmaking needs of farmers, capacity building support to farmers to enable them master the new ICT, and a user-friendly ICT-enabled agricultural information system.

Publication no. 2005/2
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Publication no. 2005/1
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Nepal is a Himalayan Kingdom situated at an altitude varying from 60 m in the south to 8,848 m in the north and is physio-graphically and agro-ecologically very diverse. It is one of the richest countries in the world, possessing about 2.27% of the world water resource (CBS 2003); approximately 5% of the total area of the country is occupied by different freshwater aquatic habitats (Bhandari 1992). Out of 818,500 ha total water surface area, there are about 6,000 rivers and rivulets flowing from north to south totaling about 45,000 km in length and covering an estimated area of 395,000 ha; these rivers and rivulets comprise about 48% of the total water resources (FDD 1998). Thus aquaculture in Nepal depends entirely on the exploitation of inland water bodies e.g. rivers, streams, lakes, reservoirs and ponds. Pond fish culture is the important part of aquaculture. The major species used are warm water carps, namely, Rohu (Labeo rohita), Bhakur (Catla catla) and Naini (Cirrhina mrigala) including exotic carps; common carp (Cyprinus carpio), silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix), bighead carp (Aristichthys nobilis), and grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella); these are under commercial culture mainly in the southern Terai plain. Cage culture of these species has also been promoted in some lakes and reservoirs in the hilly region. Though per capita fish consumption in Nepal is very low (1.543 kg/yr) (DoFD 2002) compared to other countries in the Asia-Pacific region and fisheries support only about 2% of the Agriculture GDP in the country (DoFD 2001), there has been a national initiative to promote/extend aquaculture in cold habitats for the mountain farming communities in order to generate income. A cold-water fish, the rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) has been introduced to expand aquaculture in the hills of the country by utilizing the cold-water resources available. This success story briefly narrates the outcome of research and development efforts put forth by the national programme vis-à-vis the achievements made in trout culture in Nepal.

Publication no. 2004/3
(pdf format, 1,814 KBytes)

The President of India in his address to the nation on the 50th year of India’s independence mentioned of few landmark scientific achievements. The near self-sufficiency in food and the agricultural transformation was one amongst them. Slow growth in total wheat production up to 1965 necessitated a large-scale food grain import by India under the soft (Public Law) PL480 system (Figure 1). The series of agricultural changes that happened after 1965 in cereal production was called “Green Revolution”. Many underestimated the impact of change and rated green revolution as just an increase in the food grain production. But it was the decision of the scientists, extension functionaries, policy makers, political system and above all the Indian farmer to go in for major changes, alterations and improvements in his way of farming. By 1970 the impact of the green revolution made many visionaries predict that India will become self sufficient in food grain production. The 80s made us believe that India will be able to construct adequate buffer stock to thwart the adverse weather and other calamities. The 1990s made us dream that we must be able to export some quantity of wheat. During crop year 2000, India harvested 76 million tonnes (MT) of wheat, an unsurpassed record. India continues to remain the second largest producer of wheat in the world. Despite the last few years of drought and terminal heat stress, the total annual wheat production remained at 70 MT. There is a need to keep the wheat price and supply affordable for the 240 million people below the poverty line. That apart, India will have 1.4 billion people to be cared and protected against food shortages by 2025. The last few years of decline in total production and the concern about the factor of productivity has necessitated an examination of the present stalemate. Wheat (Triticum spp.) is the most important winter cereal of India and is grown during November to mid-April. Wheat is grown during the non-monsoon months, demands less water and it is less vulnerable to yield variation. Since the monsoon season crop remains at the mercy of rainfall, and that for having a reliable and robust food security system, winter season crop of wheat was chosen.