WHEN there is a crisis of the kind that we have in agriculture, it is time to reconsider the entire sector and to come up with different techniques. The shift has to be in all the aspects that govern such a change. The obsolete structure can not deliver.

In other words, the crisis opens the door to more intellectual and creative activity. The stone and mud activity to which our farmers were subjected, has to go and the change would bring better living quality to rural dwellers. Such crisis stimulates attitudinal change.

Agriculture is facing a tumultuous situation at the moment. If the business was allowed to go on as usual, the country would have suffered yet another serious blow to its body politic. The government has taken the first step to increase production through a price policy. Will this be successful? It depends on a number of policy issues.

One of the policy issues related to was and is the cost of fertilisers. The government has tried to manage this through a massive Rs27 subsidy provided for the use of phosphate fertilisers. Is this kind of fertiliser critical to the production systems and the short answer is ‘yes’ it is. Is price policy then going to deliver by itself? Fertiliser has been taken care of through the subsidy system but what about other elements, water and energy to run the electric pumps, the micro fertiliser that is required. Water is short by about 40 per cent in the canal system. Energy shortcomings are proverbial.

Stagnant technology is the real difficulty. If that technology leaves much to be desired, the intervention through price policy would be limited. The options are totally different. Given that the efficiency of inputs is limited, the requirement would be to find ways and means to break through those technical barriers.

How will that efficiency factor work for the farmers? Are they educated enough and have they been inducted into the ways of choices on a number of alternatives? Wheat farmers have to contend with the variations in the ecological conditions; then the ability of the farmers vary.

The country sooner or later will have to bring the farmers to a level of attitudinal and knowledge level that will be common to all farmers. When the population requires more production and the productivity is not increasing, the system is making some one poorer.

So the answer lies in productive increases that are vertical in nature and not horizontal---- meaning thereby that more land would have to be brought under wheat cultivation. Let me explain. The region of the north requires that wheat be sown according to the site specificity of the conditions of that area and therefore, the weather forces one to consider buckwheat as a possible source of production.

So the search has to be on for the seeds that would be most appropriate. In the short-term, the answer lies in getting that wheat seed from any source with efforts to research the most suitable for that area which is predominantly cold and harsh and is landlocked in winter making the distribution systems difficult.

So what does technological progress mean for the nation and the country as a whole? It means substituting the expensive inputs with the cheaper inputs and this would mean the success of the price policy. Labour and manpower inputs have to be so organised as to increase productivity.

Policy makers have been especially very indifferent to labour practices in the agriculture sector. Corrections are needed if all inputs are to be utilised efficiently and meaningfully. The farmer with fewer assets is really vulnerable so that some kind of fractional technology for the small farmers is required.

As policy maker it is difficult to envisage what kind of skills the humans require for productivity increases. These skills could be subject to specifics or could be generic in nature. So foundation skills and specific skills would come in to play. The nature of interplay between humans and physical inputs required for productivity has never been examined. This has to be done and the sooner the better. The wheat farmer is dispersed through out the country and the wheat map targets all other cropping patterns. So the shots have to be called by this crop.

The agrarian structure militates against the use of inputs especially when these become expensive, for the farmer does not have any disposable income to acquire credit. This current pricing system and wheat production price support provide for the first time an effort by any government to put the farmer and the rural areas at peace with modern economic systems. It does put the urban poor into some kind of difficulties for a year or two and this could be easily removed. The nature of agriculture is such that the questions may be the same but the answers keep on changing.

Any technological change brings with it changes in attitudes and these are supposed to be positive changes. The supposition was that money in the pocket would be enough for the farmers to survive and improve their lot. Whether that has happened is another matter. Certainly the farmers are better off than before but the rural people are suffering from a number of structural problems and issues that need to be re-examined. Once appropriate measures are taken the farmer and the rural population can be brought into the mainstream of national effort. The number of landless has increased because our growth strategy lacked measures to enable the rural poor to be part of the national effort to remove vulnerability.

What then has to be done? Substitute more expensive inputs by cheaper ones and make sure every one participates in the economic growth. With market forces taking hold of the situation a more equitable and egalitarian system has to be evolved. That requires a different set of institutions and the remaking and retooling of the existing ones. Policies devised should not be for the few but for the many. A conscious effort has been made to minimize the risk through the insurance system and now the pricing of wheat. The uncertainty of the production system has some how to be matched by the removal of uncertainty of the output system. A systems approach has been done consciously and that is where the strengths of the system will be?