The introduction of the Green Revolution technology in the Indian and Pakistan Punjabs in the mid-1960s produced impressive results in reversing food crisis and stimulating agricultural and economic growth. Numerous studies have attributed the growth experience in both these parts of the world to rapid technological diffusion in the region.
However, questions are being asked about the sustainability of the ‘green revolution’ in the light of high use of external inputs and growing evidence of a slowdown in productivity growth and degradation of the resource base. Stagnating yields in farmers’ field are observed despite growing input use, especially where intensive cereal mono-cropping has been practised. These problems are considered important in the wheat-rice belt, the breadbasket of northern India and Pakistan which covers over 12 million hectare and provides food security to some 500 million people.
The two Punjabs have historically been the most developed regions and continue to be so both in India and Pakistan. In Pakistan, the Punjab province comprising around 26 per cent of the total area and a population of 47.3 million representing 56 per cent of the total population, ‘dominates’ the political and economic scene. In contrast, the Indian Punjab, comprising only 1.57 per cent of area and a population of 20.28 million, representing a mere 2.5 per cent of the total population, contributes significant share from its agricultural output to the central pool. It was reported that the percentage share of the Indian Punjab to the central pool in wheat and rice was 69 and 57 per cent respectively during 1996-97.
The two Punjabs have pretty much the same climate, both started off with similar agro-economic and land tenure systems and both share a common culture, language, historical traditions and institutional arrangements. Furthermore, both regions have since the mid-1960s experienced rapid technological change associated with the so-called ‘green revolution’. Yet, in terms of agricultural development, the Indian Punjab has shown relatively better performance.
The Indian Punjab achieved an irrigation coverage of 95 per cent of the net sown area, cropping intensity of 195, and 98 per cent coverage by high yielding varieties, which are the highest among all Indian states, but even the yields of major crops— wheat and paddy— are of a very high order, i.e., 3941 ks and 3393 kgs per hectare respectively. Almost 99 per cent of its villages were connected with all-weather rods by the late 1980s and about 77 per cent of the rural households electrified by the early 1990s. It contributes 21 per cent of India’s wheat production, 9 per cent paddy and 21 per cent cotton. With 0.744 million energized tubewells, 0.387 million tractors and 66000 combine harvesters the state’s agricultural production sector is highly capital-intensive and mechanized. It also has the highest consumption of electricity, fertilizers and the highest number of tractors (28) per unit of land (1000 acres) in the country. In fact, every third farming household in the Indian Punjab owns a tractor, and its farmers own a third of the tractors in India. In some villages, the proportion of tractor owners is found even higher.
On the other hand, the Punjab in Pakistan, like its counterpart in India made spectacular progress in its farm sector over the period, 1960’s through 1990’s. The yield of all crops there increased at an average rate of 1.8 per cent per annum, led by wheat and cotton. The highest yield gain occurred during 1966-74. The introduction of short-duration varieties of major crops, supported by increased water availability triggered double-crop cultivation on the same land. Overall, the cropping intensity rose by about 30 during 1966-94. At the same time, the production of crops in that province increased at the rate of 3.3 per cent per annum during 1966-94, slightly higher than the rate of population growth.
The rate of growth remained highest during 1966-74 (3.8 per cent, per annum) and then declined to about 3 per cent as yield growth in wheat slowed sharply. Production growth rates were maintained during 1974-84 due to rapid increases in cotton yields and release of new early maturing mungbean varieties. Significant differences in the performance of wheat-cotton and wheat-mungbean systems found was double that of the wheat-rice system.
The superior agricultural performance of the Indian Punjab, as demonstrated by almost twice the rate of productivity, owes its origins to the well-established facilities in social infrastructure, higher irrigation intensity of private tubewells, a greater use of fertilizers and insecticides and a more stable price policy in agriculture in India compared to Pakistan. These policies may also be traced back to the nature of the political regimes and the consequent role of political leadership in the two countries.
In addition, agrarian structure of the Indian Punjab, it is argued, proved to be more conducive to the development of agriculture than was the case for Punjab in Pakistan where big landlords dominate the rural scene. The case in the Indian Punjab is that most of the area is under owner- cultivation, predominantly in the hands of the middle and rich peasantry. Owner-cultivation and smaller size of holdings, helped by effective land consolidation and land reform policies, have proved to be a vital factor in the success in agricultural development.
TABLE 1
The major effect of the differences in agrarian structure (as also reflected in the differences in political power structures) has important implications for the manner and intensity of utilization of new technology as and when it became available. In the Pakistan, a small minority of large landowners controlling a majority of the land and monopolizing the agricultural inputs market are believed to have largely appropriated the benefits, channelled through rural institutions whereas in the Indian Punjab, it was both the middle and the rich peasants, managing most of the land who seized the opportunities for capitalist agriculture. Thus in the former case benefits remained restricted to a small minority whereas in the latter benefits were diffused throughout the peasantry, albeit disproportionately.
Post-green revolution scenario: The momentum of the green revolution in two Punjabs has however not been sustained. Stagnation in yields is now accompanied by increasing costs of cultivation. For instance, by the mid-1980s, a wheat grower in the Indian Punjab was obtaining lower net returns per hectare, even after incurring higher costs per hectare on modern inputs. The cost increase came largely from over mechanization, labour and irrigation costs, and not from modern farm inputs like fertilizers, seeds or pesticides, so far as wheat and paddy crops are concerned. Almost similar trend is reported in various studies undertaken in the Pakistan’s Punjab. TABLE 2
There is an evidence of declining viability of small holdings in the Indian Punjab. The number of operational holdings in 1980-81 declined as compared to those in 1970-71 due to a phenomenon of ‘reverse tenancy’ under which small and marginal farmers started leasing out land on cash terms to the medium and large-area farmers who had sufficient capital and family labour and had made investments in machinery and irrigation structures. Due to this phenomenon largely, and the non-farm work to some extent, by 1987-88, 34 per cent of the holdings in the Indian Punjab were leased in as compared with only 26 percent in 1971-72.
This trend has made agriculture in the Indian Punjab capital intensive, rather capitalist in nature. It is reported that about 20 percent of the total farming population, 24 percent of the small farmers, and 31 per cent of the marginal farmers in the Indian Punjab have income below poverty line. On the other hand, farm size in the Pakistan Punjab has continuously declined over the past three decades, with a decreasing share of that land farmed by the tenants. This trend, like that in the Indian Punjab, has caused disparity in the farm income between various categories of farm holdings and shifted the poverty profile upward, particularly so in case of tenants and marginal farmers. Nonetheless, human resource investments and infrastructure in the Pakistan Punjab steadily improved over the period 1960’s through 1990’s, while rural literacy remained very low.
Due to the intensification brought about by the green revolution, the farming sector in the Indian Punjab has ended up growing only two crops - wheat and rice - which account for as much as 71 per cent of the gross cropped area. The intensive production has led not only to monocultures in general in the state due to rice and wheat rotation and, within these two crops in particular, but also higher incidence of pests and diseases. This has led to ecological problems: decline in water table, water logging, soil salinity, toxicity and micronutrient deficiency. On the other hand, soil and water quality in the Pakistan Punjab also deteriorated during 1966-94. For example, average soil organic matter, which was already lower than 1% during the early 1970s, further deteriorated at an average annual rate of 2.3 per cent, (or a decline of over 33 per cent) during 1980s and early 1990s. Similarly, there has also been an increase in the deterioration in tubewell water quality, reflected in a significant increase in residual carbonate and electroconductivity of tubewell water. Residual carbonates have almost doubled over years, reflecting the common observation that farmers in Pakistan Punjab are increasingly tapping poorer quality groundwater.
Lessons: The land in the Indian and Pakistan Punjabs is increasingly unable to support burden of intensive agriculture. Crop yields— and water resources are declining alarmingly, and some parts are close to becoming barren. Many farmers are heavily in debt from their investments in new equipment and reliance on chemicals, and rural unemployment is increasing. Other intensive farming practices in both the Indian and Pakistani Punjab, particularly with wheat and rice, have virtually mined nutrients from the soil. For instance, heavy use of fertilizers has disastrous effect: excess nitrates have leached into groundwater and contamination of groundwater with nitrates has increased dramatically. As such, the cultivable lands have become sick through over-application of chemicals.
Combined with the stagnation of output in recent years, reflected in large-scale imports of food and food products, underline growing concerns about degradation in most valuable asset-irrigated land base in two Punjabs. Resource degradation in itself is not a reason for policy intervention if it is internationalized into producer decision making. However, in this case, there are several reasons to believe that this is not the case.
First, some of the problems have arisen from distorted policies that have lead to divergence in private and social costs. In particular, seven modern inputs were subsidized for much of the period, 1966-96. Even now electricity for tubewell operation is priced at a fixed annual rate, particularly so in the Indian Punjab, leading to overuse of poor quality tubewell water which is a major contributor to soil salinity. Second, the information base on which farmers make decisions is inadequate with respect to internalizing rapid changes in soil and water quality variables by moving to more sustainable practices such as integrated nutrient and pest management, more diversified crop rotations, and incorporation of legumes into the system. Third, public sector research has undoubtedly been biased towards development of technologies based on packages of modern inputs, and has neglected research on public goods such as integrated crop management and crops that enhance diversification and sustainability of production systems.
Indeed, until recently, very little research addressed efficient use of inputs, and the balancing of external inputs use and internal sources of nutrients. Thus from a policy perspective, there is a need for public and private initiative on several fronts-increased investment in resource management, research and extension, research to develop diversified and more sustainable cropping patterns and rotations, removal of price distortions on key inputs, especially water, and special incentives to invest in inputs such as gypsum that can connecter-act the problem of poor quality tubewell water. Such policy interventions may be rewarding if they can reverse the trend in resource degradation. However, costs of such interventions have to be considered against potential benefits, before making definite policy prescriptions.
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