Dear Ana and all other friends of the forum,
No doubt that talking about agriculture is a tricky issue, becuase it is not only an issue of production enhancement or sustainability, but it is an issue which touches and integrate with all other dimensions of society but not only cash income. It is since agriculture is started viewed from cash generation point of view, how much is invested and how much is harvested, in terms of csh generated, but not nutrient transformed from elemental form to edible form.
Production is weighed on the basis of per hectare of income generated, how much it has added to GDP, therefore definitely farmers become part of race of how much they have earned from a particularly piece of land, but not how much land can be useful to feed theri family members. This whole mode of thinking ultimately result in limited production diversity of farm operations, thus increasing risks of wasting production, it has provided, but not the cash it should have brought to the family. This results the situations where farmers through away all their hard earn produciton on road. Therefore, there are many paralel fronts where inteventions are required to address.
1. At Small and marginal farmers level, there is need of large scale awareness and motivation to adapt farming with the concept of "Family first" for nutrition/food security. This can help in creating space for providing adaptation opportunities to small scale producers and fulfill thier food security needs.
2. At policy level larger land-improvement need to be brought into arena of state responsibility to keep land productive, merely distribution of soil-health cards, those too without proper anaylsis will not result in true benefits.
3. Agriculture is not an industry where one looks from the angle of profitability, rather it is a service sector, where roduction of food (nutrition) is important, where it cost you high. Thus applying angle of input-output may be utilised to decide upon minimum price, but not the deciding factor for whether to continue with cultivation or to join labour force in cities. This has resulted in situation where a large number of farms remains fallow simple becuase thier owners do not consider cultivating them as economic, but they do not find it economic to go to thier farms economic thier salaries are much higher. Therefore this demands for policy interventions that in any villages or any category of land, owned by any one, if remain fallow, would have to give "Food security" panulty to village/GP where it belongs to. I would request FAO to institute consultations on "How we can ensure use of all kind of land for bio-mass generation to utmost capacity of them and how to maintain productivity.
4. There is need to review policies of land use conversion from "agriculture to other non-biological production uses. In India presently if some one wants to convert land category from agriculture to no-agriculture, it is criminal way where you keep land idle for three years, show no production and then it is converted to non-agriculture to other category land, I am sure all other countries might be having similar policies that facilitate easy conversion of agriculture land to non-agriculture land. This has to be seen from the angle of "social crime" where a productive land is being wasted. I am not a policy expert on land issues, but only thing I would like to bring it to the notice that soil is the backbone of agriculture and inturn food security. Thus land has to be seen from the production capacity of soil and all policies and rules and regulations are to be designed to promote production not to stp production. This can help in local and global actions to optimise resources utilisation and knowledge.
Here FAO has role to institute studies on how diffirent policies are working against or adding to better utilization towards agriclture production and in-turn food security. What are the policy changes required immediately to check on land grabbing boon.
Recently we have worked in one research program, where we focused on improving food security through interventions, and worked with 600 families, to optimise use of time (crop seasons) , spcae (productive land of different categories) and resources (rains, energy,seed,soil). The focus was on how to diversify food production within village itself and reduce dependancy on outside world. This gave way there there is need to work more on awareness, collective actions and policy aspects so as to improve production capacity and production optimization at famr level.
This is urgent to "strengthening the agriculture and nutrition linkage, through diversification in food habits, not necessary new varieties but reviving the traditional ones. It can help in adding to good nutrition to soil and food plates both. It will demand for comprehensive program of education on production-food security linkage to younger generations. This education has to follow "community learning appraoch and immediately increasing number of institutes for knowledge building and imparting to wider community in the field food security, nutrition and agriculture.
We have to note that agriculture and nutrition are the fields where there is a wide gap between the professionally educated and practiceners, they hardely interact at grass roots level, there is need to revive traditional platforms of "Gram-Copal" which were traditional platforms of knowledge building and transformation from one generation to other.
This will also provide glass to judge effectiveness of our present system of farming and food (nutrition sensitive farming system) and ultimately foster better nutrition , particularly that of the poor and the poorest. Year-round availability of vegetable in different agro-climatic conditions is not a big challenge, but similar products for all the communites is definitely a challenge. Each agro-climatic syustem has its own food system which can provide scope for it, but we have to recognise and respect those system, to bring low-cost micronutrients.
FAO can need to facilitate government to recognize importance of farmers, as nutrition service providers, thus providing them royalty for cultivating rather than considering them as liabilities.
Deepak
Mr. Deepak Sharma