Relevance: mains: G.S paper III: Environment: Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, environmental impact assessment.
What are the opportunities in Organic Farming?
- Soil fertility stability: The degraded soil quality is an important constraint in agricultural productivity in our country.
- Despite continuous use of synthetic fertilizers, driven by soil quality degradation and nutrient mining, the agricultural productivity in India reduced from about 234.5 million tons in 2008-09 to about 218.2 million tons in 2009-10.
- Adding Green manures help in mobilizing nutrients, enhancing growth promoting substances, suppress soil borne pathogens and support crops to out compete weed and prevent soil erosion.
- Biodiversity Conservation: Organic farming is now seen as a potential solution towards reducing the loss of biodiversity.
- As organic farm practices are largely intrinsic and enhance food resource, habitat heterogeneity (management of field margins and non-crop habitats), prey-predation relationships, and reduce toxic influences (prohibited use of chemical pesticides/ inorganic fertilizers), these are expected to support species vulnerable to otherwise conventional farm practices.
- Carbon sequestration: Knowledge of C-storage relative to flux in agroecosystems is essential for predictive geosphere – biosphere modeling and for reducing the excess of atmospheric CO2 levels through C-sequestration.
- As per the IPCC (2007), the soil carbon sequestration is cost effective and may contribute to 89% of total C mitigation.
- Our country with almost all major climatic zones and range of land usage has vast opportunities for soil C-sequestration.
Compared to the carbon stored in a forest, the SOC in agricultural soils can effectively benefit food production and improve agricultural sustainability.
- Reduced energy dependence: The conventional farm systems require more overall energy inputs than do the organically managed systems.
- Fossil fuel energy input is required in farm machinery, transport, production of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, etc.
- Synthetic fertilizers, used in conventional systems, are produced employing fossil fuel energy whereas cattle manure, legumes, etc., with very low energy needs, are used in organic practices.
- Reduced energy use in organic farms thus not only reduce economic load but also share to solve environmental problems such as climate change.
- Export orientation: The Indian organic produce market is exportoriented.
- It involves hidden costs such as transport and has risks to local food security. • Policies considering local demands/markets are needed for a rational balance of trade.
- Market risk: Concentrating on specific commodities is vulnerable to market risks.
- A disproportional sweep in the international market may lead Indian farmers to risk. As a WTO signatory, the government is bound to open its economy to the global market and thus, unable to protect the farmer’s Interest in this respect.
- Employment: The organic farming system, being labor-intensive can help overcome rural employment.
- Cost-benefit analysis: Agriculture forms the base of economic policies and poverty alleviation in many countries including India.
- Model estimates show that organic farming can reduce pesticide use by 50% to 65% without compromising crop yields and quality together with 50% less expenditure on the fertilizer and energy use.
What are the constraints in Organic Farming?
- Water quality: Accumulation of heavy metals in agricultural crops depends on soil processes and properties, plant and soil physical factors, mobilization of metals, concentrations of heavy metals in soil and in irrigation water.
- Wastewater is increasingly being used for irrigation in urban and peri-urban areas of the developing countries due to easy availability and scarcity of unpolluted water.
- Irrigation of crops with wastewater may cause heavy metal accumulation and degrade soil quality.
- For the success of organic farming, efforts should be made to ensure the availability of contamination-free fresh waters. In this context, a massive drive to manage surface and ground waters for irrigation and other usage is essential.
- Atmospheric deposition: High atmospheric deposition and accumulation of heavy metals in crops and vegetables have also been reported in India.
- Atmospheric deposition of heavy metals has been shown to lead multifold accumulation in eggplant, tomato, spinach, carrot, amaranthus and radish and cause damage to microbial activity in organically amended soil.
- Thus, the atmospheric deposition of heavy metals may constrain compromising organic farming with respect to its ability to stabilize soil fertility and provide toxinfree produce.
- Resource need : Livestock resources play important role in strengthening agricultural practices for large masses in India.
- With the advent of technology, the livestock population in our country has declined sharply.
- Between 1997 and 2003, cattle population in India declined by 10.23% and those of mules, camel and donkey the declines were 20.36, 30.70% and 26.30 respectively.
- Improved pasture and rangelands are essential for supporting livestock and restoring C-pool, nutrient cycling and soil quality.
- The natural pasture cover in India is rapidly declining and the problem is more acute in dry regions.
- Certification: Problems associated with certification, for instance, a time lag of three-years (conversion stage), often constrain small landholders from adopting organic farming.
- The certification is essential to authenticate organic produce and to validate the price margin in the market.
- Lack of knowledge and access to certification discourage the small farm holders in India.
- To overcome these issues, training and institutional demonstration with fiscal incentives is being provided to encourage small farm holders.
- Social acceptance: The increasing demand for organic produce is viewed as a new opportunity to aspire the economic boom with lucrative export markets.
- However, the majority of small farm holders depend on government incentives and are striving for a profit margin in the indigenous market. Therefore, small farm holders in our country are apprehensive towards adopting organic farming.
- Major issues that need to be resolved to encourage acceptance in small farm holdings include access to certification, lack of local market, cost-benefit anomalies, lack of appropriate knowledge to RMPs and non-availability of organic supplements.