Cari Technique May Raise Food Output

With barely about 17,000 hectares of arable land and 12,000 hectares of cultivable wastes, the Andaman and Nicobar islands are inherently incapable of meeting food needs of its over four lakh inhabitants. Though surrounded on all sides by sea, these picturesque islands have no source of sweet water except rainfall which, thankfully, is copious.

Still, the scope for increasing the output of foodgrains, vegetables, fruits, spices, fish, poultry and other forms of food is enormous, thanks to an extended rainy season of eight months and a vast under-exploited coastal zone. The present fish catch of these islands is only about 30,000 tonnes a year, against the assessed potential of over 8.21 lakh tonnes. The present rice production of about 35,000 tonnes, too, can be raised substantially to meet the annual demand of around 65,000 tonnes, feel experts of the Central Agricultural Research Institute (CARI), here, who are engrossed in developing the technology needed for harnessing this untapped potential.

 

"The cropping intensity can be raised from the present 100 per cent to 200 per cent or even 300 per cent with the new technology", maintains CARI director S P S Ahlawat. In fact, the technology for double cropping of paddy and cultivating vegetables and fodder alongwith rice in the paddy fields is already being transferred to the farmers. New short-duration and high-yielding varieties are also being introduced for this purpose.

Anil Biswas, a former East Pakistan refugee settled in Guptapara village, near here, has managed for the first time this year to produce more rice than needed to meet the household needs. "I sold the surplus rice for the first time in my life. This was possible only because I could raise two paddy crops, instead of one, thanks to new varieties", he said.

CARI has introduced several vegetable, pulses and fruit crops that were not grown in this village earlier. These include Bhindi (okra), brinjal, bottle gourd, pineapple, black gram, green gram, sunflower, etc. The farmers are also growing blackpepper along the arecanut trees and utilising the vacant space in between the arecanut trees for raising other seasonal crops.

The paddy-cum-fodder-vegetable farming system being widely promoted by the CARI under its technology transfer programmes involves making broad beds and furrows alternatively. While paddy is planted in the furrows that retain rainwater, vegetables are sown on the ridges. A luxuriant grass, hybrid napier, is planted on the ridges on either side of the beds to serve the dual purpose of providing nutritious fodder and protecting the beds from erosion.

Ahlawat said CARI scientists had managed to fine-tune Car Nicobar's native poultry birds into a regular poultry breed. Named Nicobari fowl, the new breed had performed better than all the indigenous poultry breeds of India, giving 160 to 170 eggs a year without any supplementary feed. This hardy, disease-resistant breed was highly in demand from various research organisations for using in their poultry breeding programmes.

CARI director said these islands had a good wealth of plant species not found elsewhere in the country. About 52 such species having medicinal and therapeutic properties have been identified. "There is a need for not only properly documenting these medicinal plants but also identifying their active ingredients for use in pharmaceutical preparations", Ahlawat said.