Vol. 39 – No. 1&2 | January - June 2013

Doubling fooD proDuction in five years

Vol. 39 – No. 1&2 | January - June 2013

ConferenCe onDoubling fooD proDuction

in five years1st february, 2013, new Delhi

Rajju Shroff

From the Chairman’s DeskOnly with proper care to agriculture, India can achieve its target economic growth and social change because 50% of our population depends on agriculture for their livelihood.

India has witnessed all round development in this sector over the last couple of years.

The country recorded bumper harvest backed by Farm Extension Work in private public partnership. This helped food grain production to a record high of 235 million tonnes. There was also impressive growth in other agriculture products and the forecast for this year is even better.

Last year, we exported US$37 billion worth of rice, cotton, sugar, marine products, beef, and guargum, etc.

We can prove that in the long term Indian agriculture is globally competitive. In fact, many experts who have studied Indian Agriculture potentials have mentioned that India can become the Food Basket to the world.

With inputs like hybrid seeds, soil testing, crop protection and farm equipment, farmers have achieved great success, but in spite of excellent growth in food production, we have fallen short of our target growth.

Keeping the agriculture production ahead of population growth is a very challenging task for our farmers, our scientists in the Research Institutes and the Industry associated with agriculture.

The Private Sector has been playing an important role. We produce quality crop protection chemicals, we have hybrid seed producers, fertilizers, farm machinery and irrigation systems. Banks and financial institutes will have to play a very important role.

The challenge before us is to double agriculture production in next five years. In many Extension Programmes, private sector has been very successful in doing just that in couple of years. If we can achieve success in one area, we can repeat it all over the country.

The problems in our rural sector are abject poverty, illiteracy, health, nutrition, sanitation and lack of infrastructure.

The biggest problem faced by India today is from the Environmentalists. They have little respect for science. I sometimes wonder if they want to understand the complete picture.

We in CCFI with our colleagues in the private sector units along with government research institutes are confident that we will be able to make India an important producer of agriculture products.

With support of inputs from all over the world, WE WILL double the food production in India in five years.

Crop Care3

Content Highlights

139 - Students’ Corner

7- National Conference on Doubling Food Production in Five Years

78 - Glimpses of Exhibition

89 - Mark Lynas - Voice of anti-GM campaign says he was wrong.

111 - News & Notes

131 - News from Members121 - Saurashtra’s water conservation

99 - A Chemical Engineer’s contribution

85 - Dispelling Disinformation regarding pesticides