The last post describes the basic problem with Indian agriculture which is low yield per hectare. Lets take a closer look at this issue. The data from the world bank shows that China and USA had a similar crop yield per hectare in 1995. Though US had significantly more arable land than China, its yield per hectare was just a little above China. During 1995-2009 , as the data shows USA increased their yield per hectare by around 55% whereas China could manage only 17% increase in its yield per hectare. On the other India though managed 21% increase in yield from 1995 to 2009, it doesn't make a huge difference because we have only increased our crop yield by an average of 3.6% per year in the last 50 years, compared to 7.3% increase per year by China. Yet another interesting comparison can be made with Australia who has even lesser arable land than China but still manages to produce yield as close as India's.
By combining statistics about the available arable area, yield per hectare and total production, we can easily find out the percentage of land that's effectively being used for cultivation. In 1961, India produced 87 metric tonnes of cereals using 156 million hectare of cultivatable land with an yield of 947 Kg per hectare, which means only 60% of the total cultivatable land has been used. Applying the same calculation for the year 2009 shows that, we have used only about 61% of the arable land to produce 248 metric tonnes of cereals. This can attributed towards the Indian monsoon system. But 60% of our arable land accounts to more than 90% of China's total cultivatable land. Clearly its not the monsoons which failed us.
The following questions would naturally occur in your mind at this point.
1. What was the reason behind USA's drastic improvement of yield per hectare after 1995?
2. How did China manage 7.3% per year increase in yield?
What could be the reason for our low crop yield per hectare?
Should we blame it on the fertility of the Indian soil or question the knowledge of Indian farmers about right fertilizers for their crop? Should we blame it on the weather for not supporting the crop growth or question the crop selection for a land?
It is evident that there's a huge gap between the farmers knowledge and the new advances in the agricultural science. Do you think filling this gap by some means, would increase our overall crop productivity?
Definitely Karthik ,
ReplyDeleteThere's a huge gap between farmer's knowledge and advances in agricultural science in India . They even don't know the government schemes for agriculture . In India agriculture sector need modernization at its grass-root level .