TWO recent developments have drawn our attention to the urgent need to advance towards sustainable agricultural production. The first is the worsening state of food security in the last decade, as reported recently by the Global Hunger Index 2021 and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report, titled The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021. Food security, notes the Global Hunger Index report, “is under assault on multiple fronts. Worsening conflict, weather extremes associated with global climate change, and the economic and health challenges associated with the Covid-19 pandemic are all driving hunger.” The second is climate change, which will have a significant impact on agricultural production and the quantity of land available for farming. There is also a growing concern about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

One of the strategies to deal with persistent hunger and the transformation of agriculture that has gained ground recently is the promotion of a package of what is called “alternative agricultural practices”. These practices comprise organic farming, natural farming (Zero Budget Natural Farming in the specific case of India), and methods emphasising agroecology. It is striking that this discourse about alternative agricultural practices has found supporters across the political spectrum. Multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, which are otherwise known for often ignoring the structural impediments (in terms of social and economic inequalities in the countryside) to agricultural advancement, are apparently supporting some of these so-called “alternative approaches” towards sustainable agriculture and food systems. Some sections of the global left and progressive movement too have fallen in line with this approach. It is important to critically engage with this growing discourse and assess the dangers and pitfalls of this particular strategy.

UNDERMINING IMPORTANCE OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY

To begin with, it is often propounded that the problem of food insecurity is essentially a case of hunger amidst plenty – that the world continues to go hungry even in the face of surplus food stocks. The argument is that the overall supply of calories per capita has significantly increased in the past across the world. Therefore, food shortage is no longer a valid concern and the problem of food insecurity is essentially a problem of skewed distribution. The implication here is that maintaining a consistent surplus in food stocks does not require any further advance in agricultural productivity. Adequate food production to feed the world, it is claimed, can be attained by small-scale subsistence farming.
 
This argument omits the fact that the current surplus stocks of food are the result of a consistent advance in agricultural productivity over the last century. The availability of food for meeting the requirement of the world’s population was realised only when more food was produced from limited land resources. Further, the argument also fails to recognise the many challenges to the future of agricultural production. The human population is projected to be 9.7 billion by 2050. Agriculture will have to provide food and nutrition security for this population with a sustainable footprint, in the face of challenges posed by changing land-use patterns, and growing urbanisation that will only add to the pressure on land, labour, and other material resources available for food production. Climate change is yet another challenge to crop production, one that may lead to an unprecedented impact on crop yields and the quantity of land available for farming. Constant advances in agricultural production systems through the application of science and technology leading to the consistent growth in productivity will be critical in surmounting these challenges.
 
While one cannot disagree with the problem of persistent under-nutrition under capitalism despite surplus food production, looking to small peasant production as the solution is woolly-headed romanticism. Expecting a consistent advance in productivity, which ensures high levels of food production with lower and lower levels of resource use from subsistence-based peasant production is illusory. As is well recognised, subsistence food production has low yields and is therefore land-intensive. It is also unfair to expect small food producers to carry the burden of ensuring a food-secure and sustainable world, while their own lives, livelihoods, and living standards are in constant peril. Higher productivity supported by an appropriate policy framework can also offer a path for better economic lives for petty producers.

Another striking aspect of the alternative agricultural practices discourse is the failure to recognise the centrality of science and technology, particularly biotechnology, in establishing a sustainable agricultural production system for the future. The discourse further underplays the role of agricultural science and technology by equating it with local and traditional knowledge. Modern science is perceived as just another element in the set of many knowledge systems. This suggests a lack of awareness of nature and the limitations of local knowledge. Traditional knowledge is generally based on practical experiences and observations that are passed on through generations. In the absence of any rigorous scientific scrutiny, such knowledge has limited validity. This is not to discount traditional knowledge in its entirety, but it must be seen in its specific experiential, natural, and socio-economic context. This is a limitation, as traditional knowledge can therefore not be replicated on any scale. An uncritical promotion of the local will undoubtedly prove contradictory to the foundations of sustainability itself.

The tendency to put local knowledge at par with science and technology also points to a lack of appreciation of the emancipatory potential of science itself. Historically, science achieved a revolutionary edge when it became a force of production under capitalism. Having developed the potential of science and technology to transform production and society, capitalism, driven as it is by profits, then limits the speed and direction of its development and realisation. In the field of agricultural science, this is reflected by the fact that research and ownership in the area of biotechnology today have been largely appropriated by agri-business corporations, despite the fact that the green revolution technologies of the mid-twentieth century, that were responsible for a tremendous growth in food production, were driven by national agricultural research systems and international public-access institutions.  
 
The current food production regimes will allow more investment in the direction of resolving the problem of food security in a sustainable fashion only when it has an associated profit motive. The need, therefore, is to unshackle the inherent potential of science and technology from private ownership and the profit motive. The opposition to private profiteering in the area of scientific research should not translate into opposition to the technology itself. Indeed, agricultural research and extension must be brought into the realm of the public to ensure that the developments in agricultural science and its benefits are not determined by the imperatives of private ownership, but by the actual needs of people, and the requirements of environmental sustainability.
 
NEGLECTING AGENCY OF STATE

This brings us to the third fallacy in the discourse of alternative approaches, which is to underplay the role of the State as the main agency to deal with the problem of food insecurity at the level of both production and distribution. This tendency is perhaps rooted in the idea of “food sovereignty,” yet another trope of the discourse, originally defined and propagated by the international farmers’ movement La Via Campesina. Food sovereignty advances the right of a nation to maintain and develop its own food production system guided by the goal of food self-sufficiency. Peasant agriculture, however, is envisioned as the pathway to achieve this goal. The role of the State is limited to establishing a system of peasant agriculture. Such an understanding of food sovereignty goes against the objective of attaining food security in a sustainable manner. Advancing agricultural production in an environmentally sustainable fashion using the means of modern science and technology requires the agency of an alert and forward-looking State. A capitalist state can hardly be expected to meet these requirements.

Progressive movements for agrarian change must demand intervention by the state, but one that is informed by a scientific and people-oriented commitment in managing surplus food production, distribution and exchange. This is a demand that is missing from the alternative approach. A stand-out example of attaining food sovereignty and overcoming hunger through State intervention is China. It has bucked the trend of rising hunger in the world and certainly did not achieve this on the basis of peasant production based on local and traditional knowledge. Instead, the success of Chinese agriculture was mainly based on achieving a remarkable leap in agricultural productivity through the application of science and technology.        

Finally, there is a clear tendency in this discourse to paper over the structural differences among different socio-economic classes involved in agricultural production. In rural India, a growing class of capitalist farmers along with the class of traditional landlords constitute the ruling classes. Some sections of this rural power elite have indeed been affected by the long phase of agrarian crises in India, although theirs control over the political and socio-economic life in the countryside remains undiminished. At the other end are the poorer sections of the peasantry, along with manual workers, who together constitute the rural poor. The alternate theorists’ vision of an “empowered” republic of small peasants, all working in joyful solidarity with each other and nature as they revive the farming practices and technologies of their forebearers, may sound attractive. It is a vision, however, that is either blind to the reality of a class (and caste in the case of India) differentiated countryside, or seeks to ignore it as it serves an agenda. 
Within the alternative approach framework there are more “reasonable” demands that emphasise the need for ensuring access to land, water and other resources to the poorer sections of the peasantry in order to achieve sustainability in agricultural production. There is an argument for providing scale to poor peasants through some form of collective action, and political power through representative structures of governance. The obstacle to all this, however, remains the landed rural elite. The struggle for progressive rural transformation in India is, therefore, primarily a struggle against this rural ruling class.