Promoting a Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sector: India

As India looks towards 2030 and beyond, its food system confronts a myriad of challenges, including heightened pressure on natural resources, the impact of climate change, land fragmentation, increasing urbanization, high rates of malnutrition among children and impacts of chemical inputs on human health (Gulati et al. 2023). Major concerns around natural resources include the decline in yields, soil fertility, soil organic carbon (SOC), and water scarcity. 86 per cent of the farmers in India are small and marginal – 126 million farmers with an average holding of 0.6 hectares (India, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer’s Welfare 2019) – posing challenges for access to improved technologies, extension services, credit, and markets that would enable them to mitigate and adapt to these challenges. Women are particularly affected by these challenges given that the agriculture sector has the highest share of women workers (62.9%) of all industries in India (India, Ministry of Labour and Employment 2023). Many of these concerns in the agriculture sector, as is the case globally, have arisen from a tendency to measure the success of agricultural and food policies through a narrow lens such as ‘yield per hectare’ or ‘per capita production’ that fails to consider agriculture and food systems in a holistic manner, ignoring the links between food systems, the environment and human wellbeing. If not amended, these can have long-term deleterious effects on not just food supply but also on human health and nature.