Manila, May 29 (IANS) India's crop management systems and harvesting patterns need to undergo a major transformation to meet the daunting food needs in the years ahead, according to the man behind the Green Revolution - the 1970 Nobel laureate, Norman E. Borlaug.
Speaking at the Asian Development Bank here, as part of its Distinguished Speakers programme, the 92-year old scientist, who helped uplift food grain production dramatically in hunger-struck countries like Mexico, India, Pakistan, China and others, said the pattern must change especially in irrigated areas, while precision farming practices are needed in the high potential areas.
The way forward, he suggested, is to move from the Green Revolution - rapid development in agriculture through use of artificial fertilisers and high-yielding plant strains - to the Gene Revolution. He rejected the concern about genetically modified crops and the polemic over chemical fertilizer vs organic fertilizer.
With biotechnology, he said, new scientific tools would be developed to help meet future food challenges and 'we must use the best cards we have'.
Within the next 25 years, India will have 346 million more mouths to feed, as its population rises from the present 1.1 billion to nearly 1.5 billion in 2030, thus beating China by over 2.6 million and becoming the world's most populous nation.
In the following two decades, the Indian population will rise by an additional 144 million - adding five Australias - to reach 1.6 billion in 2050 and pushing China further behind by more than 200 million people.
Borlaug agrees that the growing food needs can indeed be met if economic policies are correctly tuned and supported by the necessary political will. In the early 1960s, he pointed out, 'the boom and gloom crowd' wrote off India as a hopeless case for attaining food self-sufficiency. But today, India is a food grains surplus nation - a testimony to good policy and planning.
A 2002 study of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), assessing the population growth and food requirement had concluded that by the year 2030, there will be enough food globally for the growing world population. But hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will nevertheless continue to remain hungry.
Today, in South Asia alone, some 230 million people remain hungry while globally, 1.1 billion people - almost a sixth of the world population - live in extreme poverty.
World food supply over the next 50 years, Borlaug said, would have to double, while the arable land base is likely to shrink. Therefore, future expansions in food production must come largely from land already in use.
© 2006 Indo-Asian News Service | 
