Varanasi,
November 18, 2012: The 72nd annual conference of Indian Society of Agricultural
Economics concluded at Swatantrata Bhawan in Banaras Hindu University (BHU)
with agriculture specialists and scientists discussing several issues like information
communication and technology, cotton production, impact of pesticides, research
and development, investment in agriculture, protected agriculture and public private
partnership.
Society suggested various measures to Government of India
for policy making decisions. Suggestions of society act as an assisting report
in policy making to planning commission. Government of India has always been concern to
the suggestions of the society.
Major suggestions of the society for planning commission are
as follows:
Science has considerable potential to generate alternative
technologies for enhancing food and agricultural production. Research agenda
should include all technologies, traditional or modern that has visible impact
in terms of yield improvement, cost savings and quality. There is need to adapt new methods and
procedures to estimate the impact of technologies on yield, risk and on
environment.
There is need for broad economic impact studies on modern
technologies encompassing economic, social, and environmental and health
impacts. The studies should address issues like, scale bias, distributional
impacts on producers, consumers and innovators.
Studies are required on the role of government policies on
pricing of embedded technologies like B. T. cotton on attracting research
investments and incentivizing innovators. How far the existing regulatory
policy and institutional mechanism is adequate to protect the interests of
stake holders? More studies are required in this direction.
Another area which requires in-depth analysis is the
economics of Bt cotton seed production including the cost of trait value.
Studies on how the information communication technologies
play an important role in enabling the farmers ‘access to information, impact
on transaction costs associated with acquisition of information and on farm
income.
Appropriate Institutional mechanisms to forge partnership
between public-private public and private sectors in developing, sharing and
dissemination of information needs to be developed. The contents should be in
vernacular language and should be free from technical jargons./ effectiveness
and impact of alternative innovative ICT models need to be studied.
There is also need to explore use of GIS and remote sensing
crop and assessment of crop loss due to pests and diseases and extreme climatic
events. GIS use in precision farming is another important socio-economic
research avenue.
Increasing demand for vegetables creates new opportunities
to farmers to grow off season vegetables under protected environments. Studies
indicate that protected agriculture is highly remunerative but to realize wider
impacts of these technology farmers need to be linked to markets through costs
effective institutional innovations.
Economic gain of nano technology in agricultural production
and food industry is another area of research we need to look into.
Studies are required to analyze the role of technology in
mitigation and adaptation to climate change.
The pace and structure of future-agriculture would be driven
by the knowledge intensive technological approaches such as biotechnology,
geo-system and IT applications, nanotechnology, etc. The role of frontier
technologies in agriculture has to be evaluated in the context of increasing
demand for food, declining quality of land and water resources and challenges
posed by emerging climatic change in impacts.
Another important area is the application of GIS and remote
sensing in soil fertility mapping and developed equation to obtain optimum dose
of fertilization for targeted yield of crops. The developed equation can be
utilized to prescribe balance fertilization which will improve soil health as
well as reduce the cost of crop production.
PPP Cell-BHU
