Ashok Gulati writes: Balancing climate change and global nutrition

Still, we can rejoice that homo-sapiens, who learned to farm only 10,000 to 12,000 years ago—on their long journey stretching back 2,00,000 to 3,00,000 years—have been able to produce so many food that the entire world population can eat fed. This speaks to the success of science and innovations in the agri-food space. Countries that are guided by scientific knowledge and the spirit of innovation, rather than ideologies and dogmas, have produced abundant food, even in deserts, Israel for example. And many countries have suffered terrible results when they have been driven by ideologies. China is a good example, when during 1958-61, more than 30 million people starved to death during Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward.” Mao wanted to transform China from an agrarian society to a system of communist ideology based on communes. His project was a miserable failure, causing extreme hardship to millions of people. It was Deng Xiaoping, in 1978, who introduced reforms in Chinese agriculture by dismantling the communal system.

Under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, India, the second most populous country on the planet, also suffered from resorting to a heavy industry-led development strategy as a means of eradicating poverty and becoming an advanced nation. Two successive droughts in the mid-1960s brought the country literally to its knees in meeting the basic food needs of its people. India was forced to rely on PL 480 food aid from the US and had to live “from ship to mouth”. Although it did not have deaths from starvation on a scale close to that suffered by China, India soon realized that such a high dependency on others for food could lead to political compromise.

Technological advancement in high-yielding wheat varieties (HYVs) by Normal Borlaug and his team at CIMMYT, and Henry Beachell and Gurdev Khush in rice at IRRI, ensured that humanity can have enough staple foods . As is well known, Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, as there is no Nobel Prize in Agriculture, for saving millions of lives through scientific research. He envisioned the creation of the World Food Prize, something equivalent to the Noble Prize for Agriculture. It was established in 1986 and was sponsored by General Foods, the John Ruan family, and many others.

The World Food Prize is awarded each year on October 16 at a special ceremony in Des Moines, Iowa. I have participated in these events and can safely say that the nearly week-long program of showcasing advances in science, policy and agricultural programs has often opened my eyes. Indians like MS Swaminathan, Verghese Kurien, Gurdev Khush and Rattan Lal have received the award.

Lately, the focus has shifted from simply increasing food production to nutrition and climate resilience. This year’s award went to Cynthia Rosenzweig for her pioneering work in modeling the impact of climate change on food production. Nothing could be more timely than developing tools to understand the impact of climate change when climate shocks are already knocking on our doors with more frequent and intense heat waves, droughts and premature floods, putting the food security of millions of people at risk. people.

Interestingly, while agriculture is severely affected by climate change, it also generates nearly 28 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, contributing to global warming. Therefore, it is time to invest not only in climate adaptation strategies, but also to rework our policies that can mitigate GHG emissions for agriculture. The net zero carbon goal appears to be ambitious. Although a little late, it can serve humanity well, if implemented sincerely and this planet can still feed more than 10 billion people.

But changing people’s behavior cannot be achieved in a business-as-usual setting. We must work on policies that encourage people to change the way they do things, be it in agriculture or in any other field. Today, there seems to be a lack of synchronization between policies and technologies. It is high time India woke up and doubled or even tripled its spending on agricultural research and development and education. Currently, it hovers around 0.6 percent of the agricultural GDP of the Center and the states combined. This should increase to at least 1 percent and preferably between 1.5 and 2 percent of agricultural GDP. Only then can India be self-sufficient (atmanirbhar) in food, even in the face of adverse climate change.

In the meantime, on this World Food Day, let us commit to giving our best to this planet, as well as meeting people’s basic food needs. At ICRIER, we present our October edition of Af-TAB (Agrifood Trends and Analysis Bulletin) on the synergy of food and nutritional security with the environment. Stay tuned.

Gulati is Distinguished Professor at ICRIER. views are personal