Covid-19 calls for a new agriculture

The pandemic underscores the need to redefine our relationship with nature

Covid-19 compels the realisation that development paradigms need to integrate livelihood goals with those of sustainability and health. The most important livelihood in India remains agriculture. But we have never applied the sustainability or nutrition lens to farming. A narrow pre-occupation with raising yields at any cost has ultimately resulted in a serious farm crisis, whose underbelly has been exposed by the pandemic.

In a recent paper commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Niti Aayog (“Symbiosis of Water and Agricultural Transformation in India”), P S Vijayshankar and I argue that a move away from the monocultures and technologies