Observations/suggestions to “Nutrition and Food System Vo Draft eConsultation” by Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
In the past also I provide my observations and suggestions, I don’t know what happened to them? However, here are some of my observations and suggestions to Draft “Nutrition and Food system”
1. UN role: Firstly, as long as UN sub-serving the interests of Multinational Western Companies [MNCs], primarily who were/are involved in fertilizer, pesticides, GMO seeds business, reports of this nature have little practical use;
2. Report writers on ground practical experience: Secondly, Chapter 1 clearly shows that the whole exercise is “theoretical” with little “practical” real world scenarios. Definitions don’t matter much but they should have taken factual information existing on ground over different parts of the globe – countries and regions within the country. It appears the members preparing this document were not trained in this direction. Thus, this report has little practical utility.
For example, in Chapter 2, even with availability of all vitamins, if the food is adulterated or produced under polluted atmosphere the inferences are quite different. This needs practical scenario. Musi River passes through the city Hyderabad, Telangana State in India. The river carries a cesspool of poison – with domestic and industrial pollution [treated and untreated] and using this water farmers in the downstream of the river grow crops-vegetables and feed the fodder to animal that give milk and meat. Eating such food introduced innumerable diseases/health hazards. Even groundwater is contaminated with this water.
3. Role of climate change: In Chapter 3 under 3.2.1 Climate change [& 3.2.2] the statements on Page 45, lines 26-28 are inaccurate.
If we look in to Indian agriculture practices over different parts of the country before green revolution technology, known as chemical input technology, farmers developed farming systems practices for different regions of the country based on their hundreds of year experiences for soil and climate conditions. The farming system was a crop/cropping pattern linked to animal husbandry system. This system provided economic and nutrition security. This is a healthy diet. This was modified with green revolution technology after 1960s. This is a mono crop system. In the traditional system crop residue was used as fodder to animal but the mono-crop system has disastrous effect on animal husbandry with poor quality fodder.
Let me give an example of recent air pollution levels in Indian Capital City Delhi. The neighbouring states grow paddy and wheat. Farmers burn the paddy stubbles/fodder in the fields causing pollution, as this fodder is not useful for animal consumption.
4. IPCC’s role: IPCC’s climate change argument runs around temperature. In fact this runs around green fund – billions of dollars – to divert from multinational companies ineffective technologies in environment point of view.
I myself presented a study on how the climate factors, particularly temperature, influence the crop development of new high yielding crop varieties with reference to Sorghum [Reddy, 1984a]. This analysis showed a range of temperature tolerance for different varieties of the same crop. However, this varied with relative humidity and soil humidity [Reddy, 1993]. Crop growth and yield [biomass and rain] are primarily related to soil moisture condition. Texam A.M. group developed a crop-weather model, known as SORGF. This model was brought to ICRISAT [one of the 13 institutions of CGIAR] to test whether this model works for tropical semi-arid regions or not. This model was tested with the data collected over several locations [23 data sets] during 1979 and 1980 kharif and rabi seasons. It presented very poor correlation coefficient [Reddy, 1984b] – the authors tried to modify energy term but did not show any improvement. By replacing soil water balance model [Reddy, 1983] that works under diverse soil, crop & climate conditions, the correlation coefficients improved drastically. That means crop-soil-weather interaction play interactive role but temperature alone has little role.
5. Deficiency in Technology: In agriculture technology involves seed, fertilizers, Soil, irrigation & rainfall. The technology innovations were Western Multinational Companies profit driven. Here the major casualty is the environment – air, water, soil and food pollution and thus health hazards. While calculating the food production gains we rarely account this loss. Reddy (2003a) analyzed this aspect in terms of production.
With reference to paddy in the state of Andhra Pradesh – The Rice Bowl of India – the traditional paddy under irrigation yielded 1300 kg/ha; with the high yielding seed the yield increased by 500 kg/ha; and by adding chemical inputs the yield level rose by 2000 kg/ha. That mean the new technology raised the yield by 2500 kg/ha over the traditional 1300 kg/ha.
To achieve this raise in yield, government invested huge sum towards development of irrigation and fertilizer. The fertilizer subsidy has increased from Rs. 4,389 crore in 1990-91 to Rs. 75,849 crores in 2008-09. The yield reached a plateau around 1983-84 within a span of around 20 years of introduction of this technology. Under this technology, the high yielding seed is replaced by genetically modified seed showed its life is still shorter. For example, even though Bt-Cotton was not superior in any way with non-Bt-Cotton in terms of yield, in 13 years starting from 2002-03, even after changing the seed three times – Bt1 to Bt2 to Bt3 – in India the last five years the yield reached a plateau.
6. Drought Types: The mono-crop with chemical inputs technology introduced technological drought in addition to weather related three droughts, namely meteorological drought, hydrological drought and agriculture drought.
The meteorological drought is associated with rainfed agriculture and hydrological drought is associated with irrigated agriculture, which rarely coincides. On an average around 60% of the cultivated area is rainfed varying between 35% and 85% over individual countries and regions within a country.
Due to excess use of groundwater indiscriminately with water intensive crops, ground water dried out in several countries/regions within a country affecting crop production and availability of potable water [Reddy, 2003b]. With the population growth, the area under the traditional tanks gradually decreasing with the time – due to silting, due to encroachment, etc --.. In practical sense all these affect crop production and food quality.
7. UN Manipulation: The 70s environmental movement related pollution aspects were sidelined by MNCs through UN, Rio Summit. Here global warming versus carbon dioxide was brought in. Since then this tirade is going on in full speed. Now with the Republican President-elect in USA there appears to be some change in global warming; to thwart this now MNCs are directly entered the arena under the disguise of “Climate Smart Agriculture”.
The major initiatives for the agriculture sector that were discussed frequently at COP so far are Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA) and Adaptation of African Agriculture (AAA). While GACSA was launched at COP 21 in Paris, AAA has been launched at COP 22 with much fanfare.
Both of these initiatives are being promoted by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) along with various governments, especially African countries. The founding membership and steering committee of GACSA include fertilizer companies, their front groups and partner organizations. Of the alliance’s 29 non-governmental founding members, there are three fertilizer industry lobby groups, two of the world’s largest fertilizer companies and a handful of organizations working directly with fertilizer companies on climate change programmes. This leaves a lot of ambiguity and raise serious concerns. For example, CGIAR, a FAO partner in GACSA, promotes climate smart “success stories”, which promote the use of fertilizers and genetically-modified organisms (GMO), and make no mention of traditional agriculture system. There is a fear that seeds, fertilizers, pesticides promoted by big corporations multinationals will be pushed in the guise of climate smart agriculture. This will make farmers more and more dependent on market forces and hence increase their vulnerability and reduce their adaptive capacity.
8. Food waste: Globally, FAO itself reports that around 30% of the food produced is going as waste. With this, the natural resources used to produce that much is going as waste. Therefore there is a need to identify those location-region specific issues responsible for that waste. This is more important over the more production.
9. General points: Food availability is different from nutritious food availability; food production is different from nutritious food production; sea-water food is polluted, on farm-aqua-farms food produced is also polluted with chemical fertilizer use; irrigated agriculture effect food quality with salt & water-logging. Farmers need a technology that does not depends on government subsidy and western MNCs technology. This only improves the quantity and quality of food produced. India government introduced Food Security bill in which nutrition security is also part. Government is not looking at the bill in its totality to achieve the goal of food and nutrition security to vulnerable groups. No agency is bothered on it. They forgot the content of the bill while FAO trying to write reports after reports.
Reddy, S.J., 1983: A simple method of estimating the soil water balance,, Agric. Meteorol., 28:1-17 – later red it as Agric. For. Meteorol.
Reddy, S.J., 1984a: An iterative regression approach for prediction of sorghum (sorghum bicolor) phenology, in the semi-arid tropics, Agric. For. Meteorol., 32:323-338.
Reddy, S.J., 1984b: Agroclimatic classification of the semi-arid tropics III: Characteristics of variables relavent to crop production potential, Agric. For. Meteorol., 30:269-292.
Reddy, S.J., 1993: Agroclimatic/Agrometeorological Techniques: As applicable to dry-land agriculture in developing countries, www.scribd.com/Google books, 205p [book Review appeared in Agric. For. Meteorol., 67:325-327 [1994].
Reddy, S.J., 2003a: Evolution of seed technology, biotechnology!, Current Environmental Issues, Edited by B.B.S. Kapoor, et al, Madhu Publications, Bikener, India, pp. 139-158.
Reddy, S.J., 2003b: Rainfall deficit and drought intensity, Drought Management – Present & Future [With special reference to Andhra Pradesh], Edited by A. P. Rao, Sundarayya Vignanakendram, pp.29-44 & 163-167.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Formerly Chief Technical Advisor – WMO/UN & Expert – FAO/UN
Fellow, Andhra Pradesh/Telangana Akademy of Sciences
Convenor, Forum for a Sustainable Environment
Hyderabad, Telangana, India
Jeevananda Reddy