SHAS­TRI BOODAN

Econ­o­mist Dr Vaalmi­ki Ar­joon says no ef­fort must be spared to max­imise food pro­duc­tion in this coun­try.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Dr Ar­joon said this is the on­ly re­al so­lu­tion to beat food short­ages and in­fla­tion.

He said while train­ing in agri­cul­ture is good, in­ter­est­ed per­sons have many hur­dles to cross be­fore they get in­to pro­duc­tion.

“Ed­u­ca­tion­al and train­ing pro­grams in agri­cul­ture are most cer­tain­ly one of sev­er­al vi­tal fac­tors to make this hap­pen. In­deed, the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture (MoA) al­ready of­fers sev­er­al train­ing pro­grams to farm­ers and per­sons in­ter­est­ed in ar­eas such as crop and live­stock pro­duc­tion, pas­ture and farm man­age­ment, or­gan­ic farm­ing, and farm mar­ket­ing etc.,” he said.

“While it is es­sen­tial to have these pro­grams, there are oth­er de­fi­cien­cies in the sec­tor that in­hib­it these pro­grams suc­cess­ful­ly op­ti­mis­ing food pro­duc­tion. A crit­i­cal is­sue is that some who are in­ter­est­ed in these train­ings don’t have ac­cess to land to put their knowl­edge in­to prac­tice,” Dr Ar­joon ob­served.  “Many farm­ers still do not have land tenure and, there­fore, can­not ac­cess many in­cen­tives and fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance to help bol­ster their crop pro­duc­tion.”

He added: “Sev­er­al farms lack ad­e­quate ac­cess roads, face ir­ri­ga­tion is­sues, and some farm­ers lack the re­sources to be able to prop­er­ly pre­pare their lands for agri­cul­tur­al use. Un­less we can lim­it these is­sues, we will not reap the true ben­e­fits of in­vest­ing in train­ing in agri­cul­ture es­pe­cial­ly mean­ing­ful­ly im­proved pro­duc­tion lev­els.”

Dr Ar­joon said agen­cies train­ing per­sons should start train­ing peo­ple in Smart Agri­cul­ture in­stead of tra­di­tion­al meth­ods.

“While it is en­cour­ag­ing that some ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions in­tend to of­fer agri­cul­tur­al train­ing, it is im­por­tant that a ma­jor part of their pro­grams move away from tra­di­tion­al agri­cul­ture ap­proach­es and of­fer train­ing in smart agri­cul­ture,” he not­ed.  

“These pro­grams ought to in­struct per­sons in us­ing sci­en­tif­ic tech­niques and tech­nol­o­gy in farm­ing prac­tices and man­age­ment, such as drones, 5G, smart sen­sors and smart col­lars for live­stock etc., to op­ti­mise pro­duc­tion per acreage.  Such pro­grams will es­pe­cial­ly ap­peal to the younger gen­er­a­tion with an in­ter­est in agri­cul­ture,” the econ­o­mist ex­plained.

Ac­cord­ing to Dr Ar­joon, the suc­cess of any agri­cul­ture ed­u­ca­tion­al pro­gram de­pends on whether the po­ten­tial trainees are con­vinced it can al­so be prof­itable for them.

“If these trainees have a guar­an­teed mar­ket for their pro­duce and a guar­an­teed at­trac­tive price,” he said, “this will en­cour­age them to en­rol in the train­ing pro­grams. This can be fa­cil­i­tat­ed through Namde­v­co—they can ab­sorb these farm­ers’ out­put by pur­chas­ing them at a pre­arranged price. Such prices must be high enough to al­low these farm­ers en­cour­ag­ing prof­its. Namde­v­co will then sup­ply this out­put to large food proces­sors, cruise ships, su­per­mar­ket chains etc.”

The econ­o­mist al­so notes that per­sons grad­u­at­ing from these pro­grams should al­so have the op­tion of a guar­an­teed job in large-scale farm­ing or agro-pro­cess­ing in­tu­itions lo­cal­ly, es­pe­cial­ly those who may not have the land or re­sources read­i­ly avail­able to start farm­ing.

He points to road­shows as an­oth­er el­e­ment that should be in­clud­ed in the train­ing, where farm­ers and food pro­duc­ers move across the coun­try to show ex­ist­ing small farm­ers the ben­e­fits of tak­ing a more sci­en­tif­ic ap­proach to agri­cul­ture, such as aug­ment­ing the fer­til­iz­er and nu­tri­ent se­lec­tions for dif­fer­ent crops, as well as us­ing tech­nol­o­gy.

“Tak­ing a sci­en­tif­ic ap­proach to agri­cul­ture in Cos­ta Ri­ca al­lows them to pro­duce over 60,000 toma­toes per acre while we pro­duce on av­er­age 10,000,” Dr Ar­joon said.