India is vast country with diversified climatic zone and fertile land/soil spread over the entire country, with different river sources which can be used effeicently to grow different crops for food security and health security. India is blessed with natural resoures and minerasls to have sustainablitily in the feild of agriculture.Even today we get many natural herbs which have medicinal values for human beings and has good effeciency compared to allopathic medicines.
Coming to the point, with all this advantages our government policies are unable to tap the potentiality of our natural resorces and get the benefit to the poor peasants cultivating their lands desperately. At the same time the loss incurred is to the tune of 50 to 60 % through poor crop management, post harvest management, price flacuation of agri commodities, poor transportation and airline facilities, poor storage facilities etc., all this has lead our country to make loss upto 60% on the produce we get from mother earth. Farmers here depend on mono cropping in large area which leads to glut in the market and inturn influence the rate in the market.Hort duration hybrids varieties of different crops also add up to this.Indian farmers gorw the crops and the sell thier produce at less remunerative price and sometime throw away the produce as they do not get the invested returns as they grow crops which are perishable due to lack of transportation facilities from one market to the other markets.The major causes for food loss are as follows in the Indian context
1.Lack of crop planing ( Selection of Crop, time of sowing, water management,Organic manure & Fertilizer management, pest and diseases management etc.,)
2.Lack of Post Harvest technologies (lack of innovative harvesting machiniers and tools, lack of harvesting platforms and lack of transportation facilities)
3.Lack of cold storage chain link in order to increase the shelf life of the produce.
4.Lack of value addition to the produce grown by the farmers.
Farmers grow the crops and sell the same to the market at prevailing rate whether they get high returns or not. They should go for value addition to their produce through Dehydration & Food processing method.Farmers can also go sustainable agriculture like Integrated Farming System approach on their land (Agriculture Crop, Horticulture crop, Appiculture, Pisciculture,Dairy,Sheep&Goat,Poultry farming in their land) instead of monocropping in their land.
These are the some of the breif ideas which I would like to share the same with the organisation.
Phaniraj Bellary Lakshman Rao