Future of Farming and Food

Food is essential for life and food security is the basic welfare of the state. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, one sixth of world population or more than one billion of people go bed hungry everyday and one in seven people do not have enough protein and energy in their diet. According to the Global Hunger Index  for 2009, India is ranked a poor 65th in fighting hunger, and close to 23%of Indians go without food everyday. The noiseless food crisis is the serious problem for growing population. As per US census bureau, by 2050 the world population will be 9.28 Billions. How will the world meet the food needs with existing arable land and natural resources? There are multiple challenges to sustain the food security for growing population.

Agriculture is the core sector for food and economic growth which is laborious profession. Presently, majority of farmers are poor, not well educated and they don’t have finance facilities to upgrade the farming with modern technologies. Irregular, adverse climate conditions and poor farm extension services are discouraging the farm productivity. The farmers’ income dropped down and debts are in raise due to non-remunerative prices and various reasons. Already they started thinking that farming is not much remunerative and 40 per cent of them want to give up farming. Most of the people are migrating to urban areas in search of better, trendy, high- paying white collar jobs. In those circumstances, who will do agriculture and who will produce food for us? The farmers have to be double or even triple to feed the next generation. So the social standing, appreciation and safeguard of farmers should be raised.

As everybody knows we controlled the hunger and famines by introducing high yield, disease resistant, virus modified and hybrid crops named as Green Revolution. So…major investments have to be made with public and private partnership in agriculture science and technologies to develop bumper yielding and draught resistant crops. Genetic engineering has to play vital role for future agriculture to protect the crops and produce the food products with high nutrition values. Organic agriculture is good but only that itself can’t feed the growing population. The agronomists must try to educate the people on taboos and realities of Genetically Modified crops.

Agriculture occupies the 33% of land on earth, it takes 70% of earth’s fresh water and spoils 60% of it. We need 3 liters water for our daily needs and 3000 liters of water required for our daily food needs. The management of water is the key for our food production and water is going to be more expensive in future. The agriculture scientist should use the Biological, DNA solutions to replace the chemical applications for protecting the soil, air and water. Global warming, Climatic change, water shortage is going to effect the crop yields eventually food shortage. We need to develop eco-friendly farming practices to enhance biodiversity and preserve the natural resources.

In India, 30- 40 percent of perishable food produces are rot at the production site or transit due to poor harvesting procedures, improper transportation and storage facilities. Lot of food grains are going waste after harvesting in different levels like farm and storage. Processing industries have to setup to process the fruits and vegetables for future consumption. A vigorous research and development has to be done on food packaging materials to protect from insects. We need large investments to improve the agriculture infrastructure in terms of processing, storage facilities, rural transportation and supply chain linkage to the consumers.

Livestock are important contributors to total food production and their part is equal to cereals. Around 55 billion chickens, turkeys, pigs, cows, sheep and ducks are killed year for year, world wide. As per my perception, depend on animals for food is extremely strain and inefficient. Give up the meat and adopting vegetarian life style is best for human health and environment because eating meat makes the food chain longer from plants to humans. Moreover20 billions of ruminant animals are responsible for 18% of green house gas emissions. In future animal welfare, rights are going to be strong and may not be acceptable the hormone-laden feed used to make them grow faster and produce more.

The future agricultural revolution will be different from the earlier green revolution. I hope it’s the time for political policies, visionary leaders, biological, DNA solutions, software technologies, communication, renewable energies, heavy investments in infrastructure, credit facilities to farmers, education and training…..these are all collectively improve the way of farming in better fashion which leads to food security. We wish the Agriculture will reclaim its share in the economy by all these efforts.Food is prized, wasting food is not reasonable.

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In commemoration of freedom

India's wealth in Switzerland

If the money is earned and stashed by unfair, illegal, corruptive practices and kept in secret to avoid the taxes is called BLACK MONEY. Circulation of unaccounted money is big a threat to economy and loss of revenue to the government. The generation of black money is against to basic objectives of economic planning for India, those are eradicate of poverty, removal of disparities of poor and rich, generation of employment and building the nation.Money laundering is the practice of engaging in financial transactions to conceal the identity, source, or destination of illegally gained money, but in actual scenario the definition has broadened by governments and international authorities.

The Prevention of Money-Laundering Act of India (PMLA) - enacted in 2002 and came into effect on 1 July 2005 which prevents money laundering and the parallel economy. According to this act, Reserve bank of India has given the guidelines on the cash transactions, deposit tracking, reporting, operation and maintenance of the records to the all financial institutions and non banking companies, I.e KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER (KYC).However the domestic black money is turning around in our economy and it is productive up to some extent. But we need to think about the money which was stashed in foreign banks are not useful to India. Some of the estimates are stating that a $1500 billions (about 70 lakhs Crores) of Indian unaccounted money is lying in Swiss and other foreign banks. This is the highest amount accumulated outside any country, from among the countries of the world. If that money brings back to India, every family in our country would get nearly Rs. 2.5 Lakhs, the national debt will be cleared and people would get a tax- free budget for 30 years.

Just for your information that Hinduja Brothers (Bofors guys) started a Swiss regulated bank (http://www.hindujabank.com/) in 1994 and this is the only Swiss bank which is owned by Indians. We can easily figure it out that all unauthorized money could be belongs to some of the leading politicians, top industrialists, celebrities, lobbyists and underworld mafia. Recently Swiss government has liberated their banking policies due to international demands and last year UBS bank revealed 4450 secret accounts details to US Government. Still the Indian government has not initiated the process to get the Indian Individuals accounts’ details though India is the member of Financial Action Task Force (FATA) which combats on money laundering and terrorist financing. Being a FATA member, Indian can get the real-time information on money laundering from member countries and pressurize the other countries on stashed Indian money by diplomatic approach. One important thing is that all the account holders’ information (Names and whereabouts) may not be genuine because they are not fools to hold such a huge amount on their real names which can be traced back to them. The government should probe into this unaccounted money and all deposits which are not claimed by any individual must be nationalized. More information on the same, please read Mr.LK Advani’s blog: blog.lkadvani.in

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