Editorial: Regaining momentum

Sadly, the aggregate numbers hide both success stories as well as large-scale failures. Though disaggregated data for the growth in different sub-sectors of the broad "agriculture and allied activities" sector are not yet available, there is reason to believe that it is supplementary activities and not core agriculture (read crop farming) that is providing the fresh momentum. The performance when it comes to the key crops remains poor. Indeed, the production of wheat, rice, pulses and oilseeds has only managed to recover to levels that prevailed some years ago, or improve marginally on the previous records. For instance, the output of wheat, the crop that is most in the news, is reckoned by the agriculture ministry to have spurted to a record 76.78 million tonnes. But a harvest of this order is not much bigger than the 76.37 million tonnes bagged eight years earlier, in 1999-2000. In the case of rice, the other staple cereal, output in 2007-08 is estimated to have scaled a new high of 95.68 million tonnes. However, this is only around 2 million tonnes higher than the level hit six years earlier in 2001-02. The story with pulses is no different, with the 2007-08 peak output of 15.19 million tonnes being only slightly better than the 14.91 million tonnes harvested in 2003-04 or 14.26 million tonnes produced way back in 1990-91. In other words, the fresh momentum seems to be coming from activities like dairy, poultry, fishing and cash crops as well as fruits and vegetables