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Transgenic varieties combine genes from totally unrelated species. For example, we can now transfer genes for salinity tolerance to rice from mangroves. The recombinant DNA technology is part of the evolution of genetics starting with the rediscovery of Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance in 1900. In the early part of the twentieth century, various techniques like irradiation, use of chemical mutagens and doubling of chromosomes through colchicine treatment were adopted to develop novel genetic combinations.  Today such gene transfer can be done with both precision and ease through recombinant DNA technology. Both molecular marker-assisted breeding and gene transfer now play a very important role in developing genetic combinations to meet the challenges rising from biotic (i.e., pest and diseases) and abiotic (i.e., drought, flood, sea level rise, etc.) stresses. They will gain further importance in the emerging era of climate change. Varieties developed by marker-assisted selection are also eligible for certification under the protocol for products produced through organic farming.

As it is well understood, food and drinking water are the first among the hierarchical needs of a human being. Growing population, expanding ecological footprint, diminishing per capita land and water availability, increasing biotic and abiotic stresses, and, above all, the prospects for adverse changes in temperature, precipitation and sea level as a result of climate change, emphasise the need for keeping issues relating to agriculture high on the professional, political and public agenda. The multiple roles of agriculture in food production, improving nutrition and health, and climate change mitigation are now well recognised scientifically, but are yet be integrated into coherent national policies and strategies. Opportunities for generating synergy among agriculture, nutrition and health are great and this conference is therefore a timely one.

Three years after the establishment of the Central Institute of Fisheries Education (CIFE), a global conference was held at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for promoting environmentally sustainable development in all spheres of human activity. At this UN Conference on Environment and Development, generally referred to as the Earth Summit, an Agenda 21 was adopted to provide guidelines for mainstreaming ecology in all major research and development programmes. In Agenda 21, pride of place has been given to the management of aquatic resources from both the quantitative and qualitative aspects. 2012 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Rio conference.  It will be useful to prepare a balance sheet indicating where we have succeeded and where we have failed in implementing Agenda 21 in the area of inland and marine fisheries, as well as integrated coastal zone management.

It was in April-May 1968 that the country witnessed the wonderful spectacle of large arrivals of wheat grain in the mandis of the Punjab like Moga and Khanna. Wheat production in the country rose to nearly 17 million tonnes that year, from the previous best harvest of 12 million tonnes. Indira Gandhi released a special stamp titled “Wheat Revolution” in July 1968, to mark this new phase in our agricultural evolution. The nation rejoiced at our coming out of a “ship to mouth” existence. Later in 1968, Dr. William Gaud of the U.S. referred to the quantum jumps in production brought about by semi-dwarf varieties of wheat and rice as a “Green Revolution.” This term has since come to symbolise a steep rise in productivity and, thereby, of production of major crops.

Wheat production this year may reach a level of 85 million tonnes, in contrast to the 7 million tonnes our farmers harvested at the time of Independence in 1947. I visited several grain mandis in Moga, Khanna, Khananon and other places in the Punjab in April 2011 and experienced concurrently a feeling of ecstasy and agony. It was heart-warming to see the great work done by our farm men and women under difficult circumstances when, often, they had to irrigate the fields at night due to lack of availability of power during the day.

The National Food Security Bill, 2011 designed to make access to food a legal right, is the last chance to convert Gandhiji’s vision of a hunger-free India into reality.

Mahatma Gandhi’s articulation of the role of food in a human being’s life in his speech at Noakhali, now in Bangladesh, in 1946 is the most powerful expression of the importance of making access to food a basic human right.  Gandhiji also wanted that the pathway to ending hunger should be opportunities for everyone to earn their daily bread, since the process of ending hunger should not lead to the erosion of human dignity.  Unfortunately, this message was forgotten after the country became independent in 1947, and government departments started referring to those being provided some form of social support as “beneficiaries”.  The designation “beneficiary” is also being applied to the women and men who toil for 8 hours in sun and rain under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (MGNREGA).  Sixty-five years after Gandhiji’s Noakhali speech, we find that India is the home for the largest number of under- and malnourished children, women and men in the world.  There are more persons going to bed partially hungry now, than the entire population of India in 1947.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has alerted developing countries about possible steep rises in food prices during 2011, if steps are not taken immediately to significantly increase the production of major food crops. According to FAO, ‘with the pressure on world prices of most commodities not abating, the international community must remain vigilant against further supply shocks in 2011’. World cereal production is likely to contract by 2 per cent and global cereal stocks may decline sharply. The price of sugar has reached a 30-year high, while international prices of wheat have increased by 12 per cent in the first week of December 2010 as compared to their November average.

The quantitative and qualitative dimensions of under- and malnutrition prevailing in our country are well known.  The Steering Committee of a high level panel of experts on food and nutrition set up under my chairmanship to advise the UN Committee on Food Security (CFS) has recently concluded that what we need urgently is a comprehensive, coordinated approach to tackling chronic, hidden and transitory hunger, and not piecemeal approaches.

It was in 1968 that the term Green Revolution was coined by Dr. William Gaud of USA to describe advances in agriculture arising from productivity improvement. Even in 1968, I concluded that if farm ecology and economics go wrong, nothing else will go right in agriculture.  I expressed my views in the following words in my lecture at the Indian Science Congress Session held at Varanasi in January 1968:

Exploitive agriculture offers great dangers if carried out with only an immediate profit or production motive. The emerging exploitive farming community in India should become aware of this. Intensive cultivation of land without conservation of soil fertility and soil structure would lead, ultimately, to the springing up of deserts. Irrigation without arrangements for drainage would result in soils getting alkaline or saline. Indiscriminate use of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides could cause adverse changes in biological balance as well as lead to an increase in the incidence of cancer and other diseases, through the toxic residues present in the grains or other edible parts. Unscientific tapping of underground water will lead to the rapid exhaustion of this wonderful capital resource left to us through ages of natural farming.

Demographic explosion, environment pollution, habitat destruction, enlarging ecological footprint, widespread hunger and unsustainable lifestyles, and potential adverse changes in climate all threaten the future of human food, water, health and livelihood security systems. 2010 appears to mark the beginning of uncertain weather patterns and extreme climate behaviour. Events like temperature rise, drought, flood, coastal storms and rise in sea level are likely to present new challenges to the public, professionals and policy makers. Biodiversity has so far served as the feedstock for sustainable food and health security and can play a similar role in the development of climate-resilient farming and livelihood systems. Biodiversity is also the feedstock for the biotechnology industry. Unfortunately, genetic erosion and species extinction are now occurring at an accelerated pace due to habitat destruction, alien species invasion and spread of agricultural systems characterised by genetic homogeneity. Genetic homogeneity increases genetic vulnerability to biotic and abiotic stresses. To generate widespread interest in biodiversity conservation, the UN General Assembly has declared 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity.

Biodiversity provides the building blocks for sustainable food, health and livelihood security systems. It is the feedstock for both the biotechnology industry and a climate-resilient farming system. Because of its importance for human well-being and survival, a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was adopted at the UN Conference on Environment and Development held at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The Convention’s triple goals are conservation, sustainable use, and equitable sharing of benefits. CBD defines biological diversity as follows:

Variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.

Pranab Mukherjee in his budget speech delivered on 26 February 2010 announced: ‘We are now ready with the draft Food Security Bill which will be placed in the public domain very soon.’  Although no official draft has been placed on the website of the concerned Ministry, several leading organisations and individuals have questioned the adequacy of the steps proposed to be taken under the Bill for achieving the goal of a hunger-free India.  Based on Article 21 of the Constitution, the Supreme Court of India has rightly regarded the right to food as a fundamental requirement for the right to life.  Many steps have been taken since Independence to adopt Mahatma Gandhi’s advice for an antyodaya approach to hunger elimination. In spite of numerous measures and social safety net programmes, the number of undernourished persons has increased from about 210 million in 1990-92 to 252 million in 2004-06.  About half of the world’s under-nourished children are in India.  Also, there has been a general decline in per capita calorie consumption in recent decades.  Grain mountains and hungry millions continue to co-exist.

The President of India, in her address to both Houses of Parliament on 4 June 2009 announced:
 
My Government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide a statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban areas will be entitled, by law, to 25 kilograms of rice or wheat per month at Rs. 3 per kilogram. This legislation will also be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the public distribution system.

Since then, various arms of government as well as civil society organisations have been working on methods of redeeming this pledge.  The National Advisory Council (NAC) headed by Sonia Gandhi has recently provided a broad framework for achieving the goal of food for all and forever.  The suggestions of NAC include the initiation as soon as possible of special programmes all over the country to insulate from hunger and malnutrition pregnant and nursing mothers, 0-3-years-old infants, street children, destitutes, old and infirm persons, patients suffering from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and leprosy, physically or mentally handicapped persons and other disadvantaged citizens.

The goal of food for all can be achieved only through sustained efforts in producing, saving and sharing food grains.

The Supreme Court of India has rendered great service by arousing public, professional and political concern about the co-existence of rotting grain mountains and mounting hungry mouths. In several African countries hunger is increasing because food is either not available in the market, or is too expensive for the poor. Food inflation is showing no signs of abating. In our country, chronic hunger is largely poverty induced. The progress made in achieving the UN Millennium Development Goal No. 1, namely, reducing hunger and poverty by half by the year 2015, has been far from satisfactory and the available data indicate that we may have years and years to go before we achieve this target. Globally, the number of persons going to bed hungry has increased from 800 million in the year 2000 to over one billion. The position is likely to get worse in the near term, since the prices of wheat, rice and maize are going up in the global market. Adverse growing conditions in Russia, Canada and Australia are partly responsible for the recent escalation in grain prices. Nearer home, Pakistan is recovering from serious floods. According to a recent UN report, 3.2 million ha of standing crops and 200,000 heads of livestock have been lost. 

The pros and cons of wheat imports are now a matter of public, political and media concern and debate. I have been quoted as both favouring imports and opposing it. Since this issue is a complex one with short- and long-term implications, I would like to explain my personal position.

The wheat import plan announced by the Government of India is in response to the need for maintaining adequate food stocks both for the purpose of food security and for feeding the public distribution system (PDS). Following the Wheat Revolution in 1968, Indira Gandhi decided to build a sufficient buffer stock of foodgrains under government control in order to ensure that the basic staples are available at reasonable prices even under conditions of unfavourable monsoon. She was also deeply conscious of the linkage between food security and sovereignty in foreign policy. Maintaining adequate food reserves is an absolute must from the point of view of avoiding both panic purchase and famines, particularly at times when there are indications of aberrant monsoon behaviour. Some years ago the Government of India had over 60 million tonnes of foodgrain reserves and substantial quantities were exported to reduce the cost of maintaining stocks of that order.

‘To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages’ — these were the words of Mahatma Gandhi when he was healing the wounds arising from the Hindu-Muslim divide at Naokhali in 1946. He thus stressed the symbiotic bonds among work, income and food security.
 
Eradication of hunger and poverty is also the first among the UN Millennium Development Goals, which in my view represent a Global Common Minimum Programme for human security and well-being.
 
Achieving this goal is fundamental for achieving the other goals relating to education, gender equality, child mortality, control of HIV/ AIDS, malaria and other diseases and, above all, environmental sustainability. Unfortunately, progress in the reduction of hunger and poverty is poor in most developing countries excepting a few like China. FAO estimates that as a result of the rise in the prices of basic staples, about 75 million more people have been added to the list of those going to bed hungry during 2007. As a single nation, we in India have the largest number of malnourished persons in the world.

The post-independence history of our agriculture can be broadly grouped into four periods. Before describing them, I should mention that during the colonial era famines were frequent and Famine Commissions were abundant. The growth rate in food production from 1900 to 1947 was hardly 0.1 per cent. Most of the important institutional developments in agriculture emanated from the recommendations of Famine Commissions. The great Bengal Famine of 1942-43 provided the backdrop to India’s independence. It is to the credit of Independent India that famines of this kind have not been allowed to occur, although our population has grown from 350 million in 1947 to over a billion now.

The National Food Security Bill 2011, which is now on the website of the Union Ministry of Food and Consumer Affairs for public comments, aims to make the Right to Food a legal right. During the last seven years, the country has witnessed a transition from political patronage to legal entitlements in the case of education, information, work and land rights in tribal areas. When finally enacted, the Food Security Bill will be the brightest jewel in the crown of Indian democracy. Therefore, public scrutiny of the draft Bill is important. The draft Bill mentions that its aim is “to provide for food and nutritional security in human life-cycle approach by ensuring access to adequate quantity of quality food at affordable prices, for people to live a life with dignity”. Unfortunately the Bill is its present form will not be able to fulfill this inspiring objective.

The legal commitment contained in the Bill implies that every child, woman and man should have physical and economic access to balanced diet on the basis of a life-cycle approach, i.e., from conception to cremation. Nutrition security involves access not only to the needed calories and protein, but also to micro-nutrients like iron, iodine, zinc, vitamin A, and vitamin B12. In addition, clean drinking water, sanitation and primary health care are essential for ensuring that food is properly assimilated in the body.

During his visit to India, President Barak Obama pointed out that our country is fortunate to have a youthful population with over half of the total population of 1.2 billion being under the age of 30. Out of the 600 million young persons, over 60 per cent live in villages. Most of them are educated. Gandhiji considered the migration of educated youth from villages to towns and cities as the most serious form of brain drain adversely affecting rural India’s development. He therefore stressed that we should take steps to end the divorce between intellect and labour in rural professions.

The National Commission on Farmers (NCF)(2004-06) emphasised the need for attracting and retaining educated youth in farming. The National Policy for Farmers, placed in Parliament in November 2007, includes the following goal of the new policy:

To introduce measures which can help to attract and retain youth in farming and processing of farm products for higher value addition, by making farming intellectually stimulating and economically rewarding.

The country is at long last becoming sensitive to the serious consequences of the growing rural-urban divide in terms of investment, infrastructure and opportunities for income and employment. The rural-urban divide also leads to an expanding rich-poor divide. Since crop and animal husbandry, fisheries, forestry, and agro-processing are the main sources of rural livelihoods, the current agrarian crisis is adding to the problems of hunger, poverty and unemployment. According to the Union Planning Commission, we are off-track in achieving most of the UN Millennium Development Goals. A major cause for the growing rich-poor divide both between and within nations is unequal access to modern technology. Technology helps to achieve a paradigm shift from unskilled to skilled work and thereby move large numbers of the rural poor from the primary to the secondary and tertiary sectors of economic activity. If technology has been a major factor in promoting economic and social divides in the past, the challenge now lies in enlisting technology as an ally in the movement for economic, gender and social equity.

Norman Borlaug’s early upbringing in an Iowa farm and his experience of hardship during the US Depression of the early 1930s instilled in him the desire to bring science to address the problems of low farm productivity, poverty and hunger. After completing his Ph.D degree in Plant Pathology at the University of Minnesota in 1942, he joined the Rockefeller Foundation’s agricultural programme in Mexico, leading to the birth of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). There he began his work on wheat, concentrating on the control of stem, stripe and leaf rusts, the important diseases of the crop. He introduced a multi-pronged approach to manage the rust fungus, including the development of composite varieties characterised by phonotypic identity but genotypic diversity with reference to resistance to different races of the pathogen, an approach conferring enduring resistance as a result of reduced pressure on the fungus to mutate and create more virulent strains.

Bhutan has developed the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a substitute for Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In this theory, GNH comprises spiritual and cultural values, including love of sport, music, dance and spiritual activities. This is a good departure from measuring happiness purely from the view point of money. I would like to elaborate on four pillars that are necessary to uphold sustainable human happiness.

Ecology

There is an increasing awareness of the need for adopting sustainable lifestyles which will not make a heavy demand on our life-support systems of land, water, biodiversity, forests, oceans and climate. In his book titled World on the Edge.1 Lester Brown has described how we still have time to prevent environmental and economic collapse. Recent calculations on the ecological footprint each one of us is leaving behind shows that our per capita consumption of natural resources is exceeding the biocapacity of our earth. Soon we will need two planets to meet the growing demand for land, water, forests and biodiversity. In this context, we should keep in view what Mahatma Gandhi said long ago: