Do we need to keep Increasing Crop Productivity for all Times to Come?

In the first editorial of the Journal of Agronomic Research entitled The Changing Scenario of Agriculture published on December 26, 2017 5, I had discussed various forms of agriculture and stressed the need of sustainability in food production. In particular, I described dialectical agriculture 4 as the one based on dialetic2, 3, a thought process given by Hegel, a German philosopher, that moves in a three-beat rhythm. It begins with an idea- a thesis- then proceeds to develop into its opposite, the antithesis; after that the mind sees the relatedness of thesis and antithesis and weaves them together into a synthesis. This synthesis, in turn, becomes another thesis, and the dialectic continues. To give an example, let us consider the cultivation of a crop on a given piece of land in a given season. It can be regarded as a thesis. In the next season on the same piece of land, it is not cultivated i.e. kept fallow which being opposite to cultivating, is antithesis. In the third season, synthesis is brought about by cultivating the same crop again. If one looks upon it from the ‘soil' point of view, in the first season, the organic matter of soil is used to grow the crop; in the second season as the land is kept fallow, the organic matter of the soil is not used. On the contrary the piece of land builds up the organic matter of the soil. In the third season when the crop is cultivated again the builtup soil matter is used in its cultivation. The consumption of organic matter for cultivating the crop in the first season is replenished in the second season with its renewed use in the third season thereby preventing the loss in soil fertility. One needs therefore to ‘invent' a management practice as the situation demands and keep on doing it as a regular process in crop husbandry. In other words, while non - dialectical view only looks at the crop under cultivation, a dialectical view considers the land, soil, water and other components along with crop variety in totality so that possible interactions amongst the components are also exploited along with multidirectional causation with feed forward and feedback mechanisms. Ever since, around 200 years ago, when Thomas Malthus linked food production with the population, the strategy has been to produce enough food to provide for increased population. But barring those countries that have slowed their population growth rate the number of hungry people in the world remains approximately the same. This is because the increase in food production is offset by the increase in population so that the per capita availability of food remains practically the same. Increased population has therefore become a central issue. The present global population of 7.33 billion is expected to become 9.54 billion by 2050. The present food grain production is therefore required to be more than doubled to meet the requirement of this expected population by 2050. Not only agriculture, in fact, almost all sectors are affected by it. We go for any activity and we have crowds, crowds, and crowds. Demographers and population scientists have no doubt been making efforts to arrest the growth of population by suggesting the adoption of relevant policies. Even if the policies succeed, the population will still grow for a long time by sheer momentum. So the problem of agriculture is in fact to produce more and more in spite of populationpressure. We have already reached the limits of increasing food production by expansion of acreage – the horizontal dimension. And since green revolution we have been exploiting the vertical dimension of increasing the crop productivity. Prospects seem good if we are able to adopt biotechnological methods and advantages of genetic modification in crop plants, livestock, poultry and fishery etc. But there is a catch. We may not be able to achieve quantum jump in productivity as we need to increase productivity in a sustainable manner.