Food Output Must Rise By 5m Tonne: Swaminathan

Foodgrain production will have to grow at five million tonne a year in the next two decades if the country has to sustain food self-sufficiency, said noted agriculture expert M S Swaminathan.

Total grain output would have to be raised to nearly 300 million tonne, from the present around 200 million tonne, by 2020 to meet the demand of the burgeoning population, he said while inaugurating the five-day international conference on management of natural resources for sustainable agriculture in the 21st century, here, yesterday.

Hailed as the man behind India's green revolution, Swaminathan said there was a need for a "yield revolution" now. It would be possible only if greater attention was paid to improving the efficiency of input use. A multi-disciplinary constraints analysis would have to be undertaken in different regions of the country to identify ways and means of bridging the gap between actual yield and the available potential with existing technology. He described the available untapped production reservoir as a "blessing" from this point of view.

 

Expressing similar views, Indian Council of Agricultural Research director-general R S Paroda said farm research had shown that the real potential of the land even with the presently available technologies was three to four times the current output.