 The topic for today is food resources, food is extremely essential with we saw water and energy which are also essential food is also and it is food is interesting because it is again very closely related to the some of the other problems like the water problem then biodiversity and the overall biosphere. So unfortunately there are many many problems related to food and in many parts of the world including many parts in India there are the hunger statistics are really very disturbing. So this picture shows the plight of a woman who is unable to feed her family because the food prices went up by as high as 600 percent. So she is forced to feed her children with some wild cabbage. So okay this is the outline of the talk we will discuss the various dimensions the various problems in this area of food the related hunger poverty and things like that and then in the other part we will try to look at the various solutions that can come out and again there are number of good ideas we do not know which idea is the is the best I do not think there is a single best idea there are many good ideas and there are some ideas that are there are probably not very good. So we will discuss that when we get over there. This was a newspaper article several years ago showing how driven to starvation even children have to feed on mud cakes that is the level of starvation that exists in the world. India is ranked 15th in the global hunger index and we have something like 23 percent of people who go hungry. The malnourishment statistics in India are also very very disturbing 60 percent of India's children below the age of three are malnourished according to a 2005 report. Now related to the hunger poverty lack of sanitation or poor sanitation very closely related to that is the health issues infectious diseases and things like that which again are major concern. So when you are basically if you are not healthy and if the surroundings are not clean and if the water and food that you consume is not hygienic then you get so many diseases. Now if you actually look at the world food production there is probably as of now there is enough to feed everybody as in nobody should starve and this is because due to the the green revolution and so many advances in irrigation and agricultural technologies the food availability has risen since the 1960s to 2008 is what this number is about. So we have roughly 2790 calories should be calories per person per day. So in that sense at present we have sufficient but the population presently is at just above 7 billion in the next couple of decades it is likely to rise up to 9 billion and if that happens then the situation is going to be very different we will not have enough food to feed everybody. The starvation that we observe in different parts of the world is in spite of the world producing enough food in the first place. So the problem really is that although food is being produced may be adequate food is not being produced where there is poverty and starvation so the distribution is actually the issue. So this graph kind of shows you how we presently make enough food and how in 2050 so this is the this is the line we have to make at least this much this is the recommended consumption of food and by 2050 we are the world as a whole is likely to fall below that line. So a major problem is coming and in spite of producing adequate food for everybody we have so many people starving so you can imagine that if you are not producing on an average if you are not producing adequate food then how many people will have to starve. So these are again more numbers you know this slide basically shows you about how much inequality there is in society whereas so many people are starving I mean there is and there is large number of people below the poverty line so for instance 80 percent of the world population lives on less than 10 dollars a day. At the same time you have the world's 358 billionaires who have assets that exceed the combined annual incomes of countries which hold 45 percent of the world population. So that is the level of these 358 really really rich guys they have so much of assets that it is those assets are larger than the entire annual incomes of countries which hold more than just under half of the world population. So in this scenario do you think that solving the hunger problem is impossible. Actually it is although the numbers of people starving and the numbers below poverty line seem to be large but if it is if it is only about feeding everybody that may not be that difficult the some nice examples kind of show you how it could actually be possible. So I mean these are kind of funny examples. So for the price of one missile a school full of children a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for five years or the second statistic which says that in the decade between 1990 to 2000 roughly 100 million children died due to starvation. So that number could actually be saved if the world military expenditure world over all countries put together if that military expenditure stopped just for two days and all that money was diverted to feeding people just within two days of the world military expenditure you could you could have fed all the 100 million children that died or that amounts to just the price of 10 stealth bombers. But what is actually happening is quite the reverse there are the rich are busy satisfying their luxuries and the poor are not getting enough. This cartoon shows how so there is a global north and a global south basically it is the rich versus the poor maybe the rich countries versus poor countries or it could also mean rich people within a country versus poor people within that country. So you see how the rich people are so worried about feeding their SUV with biofuels. So these are the world's food resources so the plentiful food resources of the world are being converted to the agricultural land and you know things like sugarcane and stuff to make bioethanol or corn. So all that the biofuels are going to feed the rich people whereas the people who are starving they do not have enough food to feed their children. So this is I said that it is a distribution problem and a very important factor in that is the fluctuating prices. So when prices fluctuate very drastically as indicated in this figure the poor people are greatly affected people like you and me are hardly affected because the fraction of our salary or our income that goes towards food is relatively smaller whereas the poor people it makes all the difference if there is a 50 percent or 100 percent rise in the prices of rice or wheat or maize or whatever it is. So the reasons these prices fluctuate are many sometimes it is caused by some losses in yields due to adverse weather conditions sometimes the energy costs I mean these prices kind of follow the costs of energy on the world market. There is an always the general increasing trend in many cases is due to pressure of rising population there is also an increased preference for meat and dairy products among consumers. So that leads to scarcity because actually we are going to see that towards the end we are going to see how meat consumption makes requires more land to support an individual think of it in terms of the ecological footprint if your food choices are towards meat and dairy consumption then your the land required to support you is much higher than if you were a vegetarian. So but there is an increased preference world over for these products and that again is worsening the problem again part of the food crops or part of the land required for food crops is being diverted towards biofuel production there are also issues of financial speculation and price fixing that goes on which which was in this problem and then there are policy factors also. So due to a combination of all these factors you know you have these prices that fluctuate and it is it is simply not helping the poor now we have spoken about the rise in population expected in the next couple of years. So that is going to put tremendous pressure on the available arable land. So if you look at the world arable land over the past half a century you will see how it has been steadily decreasing and if the population goes on increasing that trend is going to continue. So if you if you see and the since the population density is in various continents and various places is different on the left you see that Asia for instance has got very little arable land per capita as opposed to some other parts of the world. Now in India you see that roughly 60% of India's land is under agriculture and in spite of having so much land under agriculture India on an average does not boast of very high productivities in the world. In fact our productivities are often maybe several times less than the world's highest productivities and the reasons again are many but primary among them are probably soil and land degradation the low fraction of land arable land that is irrigated is also one of the important things. And then in many places agricultural technology and know how is again limited. So that again the yields could be boosted by that. So what I have been showing so far may appear a little disconnected because I am touching upon many different topics but I am just maybe sharing with you the various issues that exist the various dimensions of this problem that exist and maybe drawing a few connections between all of them there are many more connections that you could make but I am maybe pointing out that some only few of them. When there is adequate food available but still people are starving one important reason why that is happening is food wastage and spoilage. So food gets produced but perishable commodities before they even reach the market fruits and vegetables you know they require they do not have a very long shelf life and transportation infrastructure is limited cold storage facilities in many places are totally absent in some places there are they are again very limited and then they are tightly controlled. So the chances that a small farmer or poor farmer can avail of these facilities is again very slim. There are warehouses or go downs where grain is stored but it is rotting rat infested go downs. So there are a number of problems moreover when the food is actually purchased by us even cooked food be it fruits vegetables or even cooked food that has gone through so many operations and so many processes and activities to reach our home or to reach our plate that again is being wasted by I think in most families sizeable proportion of food ends up getting wasted some things just rot there some things get spoilt in the refrigerator you just forget about it and some people you know have a habit of serving food for themselves and then not consuming that all these things put together you know maybe add up to this number which says that one third of the world's food is being wasted while 0.8 billion people go hungry. So I think this is something where directly our habits our consumption habits can definitely make at least a small impact the spoilage that happens during transportation and lack of cold storage facilities that is not for us consumers to do much about but at least after purchasing of the food to ensure that we purchase only what is required and then what is what is purchased is properly consumed if it is before it gets spoiled if it is possible to give it to somebody who is in need then that is definitely useful. So now there are various threats to our food security in the present and in the future I have listed them all on one page some of those things I have explained in the previous slides some will be explained in the subsequent slides but this slide is kind of a summary of the various threats and each of these points has a lot many dimensions. So you can maybe use your imagination and when you discuss with your students you can take one or more of these issues in more detail you could even have discussions with students. So the examples are rising population so yesterday evening we had a session on the on society and environment and population is definitely one of the important issues over there. So when you discuss population you can connect it to this topic or when you discuss this topic you could connect it to that topic these connections are what are very important a lot of times are missing and that is why students end up leaving the class confused and they do not get a coherent picture and when they do not get that then it kind of worsens that lack of interest and lack of motivation that they already have for this course. So you have unequal distribution diversion of food grains as livestock feed or biofuels so when I said that meat consumption requires more land to support you it is because the livestock feeds on the land and you feed on the livestock so you become so instead of becoming a primary consumer you become a secondary consumer and people who remember a little bit about the trophic pyramid you will realize that it is pyramidal in shape which means that some of the biomass as well as some of the energy gets wasted as you go from one trophic level to the other. So these are all these connections that we need to make you back to ecology and things like that global climate change is one major issue because with global climate change more droughts, famines, floods, severe weather episodes and things are possible are more likely and if that happens if the rainfall patterns and things change then the food shortage is going to be very serious. There is another important issue of GMOs and although I will not cover too much in this in these two sessions but there is adequate material available and I will point you to some sources so you can do that on your own. Very related to the GMOs is loss of crop and wild biodiversity our crops may be a hundred years ago had tremendous diversity within the crops so if you talk of rice most people commonly know only a few varieties of rice at least most people living in urban places only a few varieties of rice but India is the cradle of the rice plant and it has thousands of varieties of rice of different colors of different sizes of different shapes of different tastes and flavors and which can grow in different places. So there are there is rice which will grow which does not require flooded fields there are there are highly fragrant varieties of rice. All these this variety existed in various crops including vegetables not only food grains in fruits and vegetables and things like that we still have adequate variety but it is shrinking and it is shrinking because of preference towards only select varieties and that preference is again engineered it is due to advertising and lots of even some very shady tactics by major corporations where we are losing our choice to purchase various varieties and farmers are losing their choice on what to plant even though some of the local varieties are better adapted to their soil and local conditions. So we looked at these various dimensions of that of the food crisis and we know that in future food availability is going to be low so now we need to find solutions and talking of solutions what comes to our mind is we must grow more food and improve our productivity and our only friend to enable us to do that is technology and technology has helped us overcome so many problems in the past and this problem is no different we can count on technology to help us tide over this problem. So in that direction maybe we need to move towards industrial agriculture it is already agriculture is already like an industry in the in the west so we need to adopt those things like mechanization you have these large tractor combines and you have chemical fertilizers herbicides and what not biotechnology even genetic engineering a lot of people think this way but is this the only way or is this the best way so there is there is doubt because there is a debate whether this is the best way and that is why I have put a huge question mark for engineers it is almost natural to think in this direction that if there is a problem that technology will solve it but these are biological systems we need to think a little different but anyway if we are in doubt we can always look up to our leaders or world leaders they are surely aware of these problems and they must be busy solving the problem or let us see there was a G8 summit several years ago on the alleviation of the food crisis and poverty in Japan and all these leaders the world leaders they met over there to find a solution for these people for the poor people and guess what this was a newspaper article I liked it very much so I picked it up it is they were enjoying an 18 course banquet as they discussed how to solve the global food crisis and in case you are wondering what was on the menu then it is an 18 course banquet after all so we have these two interesting stuff this is exactly what the starving millions need if you are convinced that our leaders are really busy solving this problem I am not convinced I think we need to think a little different let us look at some of the solutions I give you some examples of how much it would take or what it would take to feed all the all the poor people in the world and it turns out that it might not be that difficult if these world leaders actually intended to do good they would have done it long ago but not much progress has happened in that direction so the problem persists and solutions will have to evolve let us look at the first maybe only a theoretical solution because the theoretical solution is that through proper food distribution we can solve the world hunger problem for now and that is easier said than done but let us just look at that since the world already produces enough food it can be theoretically solved but the problem is that the excess food production is in countries where it is not required so it is fed to cows and pigs and in the countries where there is starvation there they are not able to make food and in order to distribute the food from where there is excess to where there is insufficient food is not happening because of the global market and the prices it is unaffordable to the poor people within a country and it is unaffordable to poor countries now these many of these poor countries are in debt and if they are in debt they have to essentially encourage or even force their farmers to grow cash crops so that they can export the produce and get some money for the country so that is not helping this problem because when they grow more of cash crops there is less attention to the food scarcity of in that country and the malnutrition problem again wars in some places are a very important reason why so many people die of starvation if roads are damaged rail rail roads are damaged if food resources cannot reach the starving let's say there is a drought in a certain place food and other supplies have to reach that place but if the roads and things are damaged as commonly happens in case of a war then the aid will not reach those people and then the starvation deaths increase very drastically so a country which has to fund an ongoing war naturally cannot pay attention to modernization of their agriculture or improving their agriculture even even standing fields can be burnt down so no wonder it causes so much of starvation okay there are now these things the international issues like wars and the economic arrangements may be they are not easy to solve but at least within countries if the markets and the transportation infrastructure and all that can be improved that can definitely go a long way so I have listed several things that can be done in order to improve distribution within a country and you can again go through it later I am not going to go much into it now there is in the context of food distribution there is there is a concept called as food miles so I would just like you to note to this point the total miles covered by the food item the total distance in in miles or kilometers covered by the food item from the farm to your plate is is what is food miles so if you are consuming food items for example we are here in Mumbai and if I if I go out in the market and I buy some apples so obviously no apples grow in Mumbai so where do they grow they grow in Kashmir so from Kashmir to Mumbai the the apple has travelled all the way to reach my plate so the the food miles associated with that are very high now the the higher the food miles the greater the environmental impact and how does that environmental impact come about the the transportation is probably by road or rail and both these means of transportation use fossil fuels so there are greenhouse gas emissions so for every apple that reaches over here some amount of carbon dioxide has been emitted so it is important from a sustainability point of view to reduce the average food miles when we make choices of purchasing food items we can make intelligent choices so that we reduce the the food miles moreover the longer the distance the food has to travel from the field to your plate the greater the chance of spoilage so from from Kashmir all the way to Mumbai the the train or the or the truck does not reach in one day so if it has to if it has to spend several days and sometimes stranded at at various check posts and things like that things rot and they get spoiled for fungal diseases will attack it so this leads to more and more spoilage from a sustainability point of view it is most preferable to source your food locally so try to try to get things that grow locally and try to get things that grow in that season so placing a demand for apples in summer is encourages large quantities of storage of apples in cold storage but in in in the summer in in Mumbai for instance there are mangoes are plentiful so why not have mangoes why do we need apples in in the summer months there are different varieties of fruits there are some local varieties of fruits which are very tasty very healthy which which we can and the same applies to to vegetables also so consuming out of season produce leads to more spoilage so more food has to be stored in cold storage and some some spoilage is inevitable over there okay so there are there are more points and you can you can go through them now this is what what we saw is that that distribution can can see us through for now but that is not a complete solution because the population is rising and the demand for food is going to increase so we need some solution and can industrial agriculture be that solution is the question so before we even attempt to to look at solutions I think it is obvious that there is no easy or simple solution as Professor Parthasarthi also mentioned the so-called simple or simplistic solutions are probably not solutions at all the the the food problem is very complex and we need to go deep and understand various things there are there are various aspects to it there is an economic aspect there are social aspects there are ecological aspects biodiversity related issues so we have to analyze the situation from various angles and only then can we come up with solutions but anyway since the many people think that industrial agriculture can can solve the food crisis let us try to to understand that problem now it turns out that around this this data is from around 2010 it turns out that agriculture has a very important contribution in the adverse global impacts global environmental impacts so if you look at greenhouse gas emissions 24 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture and 37 percent of land mass is used for agriculture this is excluding Antarctica because there is no agriculture over there if you look at water withdrawal through surface as well as groundwater sources 70 percent of water withdrawals all over the world are for agriculture so the the the impacts of present agriculture now present agriculture is a mix between traditional agriculture and industrial agriculture in in the west you have more of industrial agriculture in in some of the developing countries you have some traditional methods that are still used but with the traditional method they they have started adopting chemical fertilizers and other agrochemicals so if you what what we saw in in general over here and in a quantitative manner if we if we look at it in greater detail you will see that the conventional form of agriculture has has various activities that are done and almost each activity has got very major environmental impact for instance when the land is cleared for agriculture as is happening on a large scale in in the amazon but it is happening in many parts of the world also there is a loss of biodiversity and habitats there is topsoil loss topsoil is one of the greatest resources that we have that is how we get our food but we are not paying adequate attention to it and due to erosion and many other degradation processes the topsoil is being lost now I I also explained to you in the topic on water how when land is does not have vegetation and it is exposed to sunlight and drying out then the recharge of ground water is reduced because the the water tends to run off more rather than percolating underground also the land clearing is associated with carbon emissions if you when biomass on the land is cut and parts of it is burnt the carbon is returned to the atmosphere and not only is the biomass above the soil but there is a lot of biomass under the soil also so when there is deforestation the biomass that that is under the soil also dies and like the root mass basically it and there are microorganisms and soil humus and things like that that gradually that that starts emitting either carbon dioxide or methane depending on the conditions and contributes to global warming so land clearing the first step in in any agriculture causes so many environmental impacts then when you run heavy machinery like tractors and all that that again damage the soil there is compaction of the soil soil must be porous it should be porous crumbly and light in nature if you run heavy machinery over that it gets compacted if it gets compacted then water cannot water and roots water roots and air cannot penetrate into the soil and it may lead to even water logging if there if there are rains heavy rains or heavy irrigation and the equipment also obviously consumes oil so there is an oil dependence and carbon emissions associated with that now plowing is thought to be very fundamental for agriculture but plowing leads to soil damage it leads to loss of soil structure porosity moisture and when organic carbon from the soil is lost the ability of the soil to hold moisture also reduces the the biological community that exists in the soil soil is a living entity there is there is not a soil is not only mineral it is there is inorganic matter and there is a lot of organic matter there are microscopic creatures there are larger creatures like earth worms that all live together and make the soil fertile so they when when you plow it it reduces their populations and leads to carbon emissions the fertilizers encourage fast plant growth the NPK fertilizers but it can also lead to micronutrient deficiencies so that is another problem associated with modern agriculture and when when there are some deficiencies then the plants become more susceptible to to certain diseases so likewise you can go through each of these environmental impacts and I would like to emphasize over here that you can you can note down the this the name the title of this slide in your notebook because this understanding and discussing this slide in your class will require considerable homework from your side each of these points that I have written can be understood to be something like a hyperlink you know even when you read any web page you have several hyperlinks so if you click each of the hyperlink that it will open a new page so there is a large amount of content to be discussed for each and every of these points and it takes time to to to go through so much of material and to be able to discuss with with your students in class so simple things like you know like salination of soils or evaporative losses and how how they can what are its consequences and things like that so I request teachers very sincerely to go through this it will not happen overnight and this I mean students will just maybe go through the slide and they might not notice what all there is but if you understand this then maybe you have understood many issues related to to the conventional ways of agriculture okay now another issue which again I am not going to spend much time on that but there are a lot of resources on this this is something very scary thing that is happening which is a corporate monopolization of agriculture the I know the data presented over here is a little old but I think it is still easy to understand we see that in agriculture there are some relatively few very large corporations which are which are monopolizing the market so in this is 2001 you have the 10 top 10 agrochemical corporations they controlled 84 percent of the market of the agrochemical market if you look at veterinary pharmaceuticals the top 10 companies controlled 60 percent of the market and 10 top 10 pharmaceutical companies controlled nearly 50 percent of the market so what we see is that fewer companies fewer large companies are controlling the entire market now that that does not benefit the consumer because once they control the market then we are basically at their mercy if you take GM crops genetically modified crops the top six corporations controlled 98 percent of the world market in GM crops so only six corporations in the world basically control the entire market and those same six firms also control 70 percent of the pesticide markets so in other words what these companies are saying is that you purchase genetically modified seeds or material from us and in order for those plants to survive you have to also purchase pesticides which are available with us alone so you have to purchase the seed as well as the pesticide so basically they are they are making you addicted to them and within that within the GM crops 94 percent of all GM crops were from only one company's germ plasm and that was Monsanto so that in my opinion is very risky now maybe you may say that oh what is the problem in us depending on corporations for everything yeah there would not be any problem if the corporations were very altruistic and committed to the well-being of society but the track record shows that they are not committed to the well-being of society they are committed to the to increasing their profits and poverty alleviation and feeding people or consumer health is is hardly their concern they they have what they are interested in has been termed as bio imperialism so it is a new form of imperialism whereby by controlling food resources by genetic modification and things like that that they want to basically make the entire world their empire now many people have have objected to this and have have seen this pattern and have been very disturbed by that and I have a few quotations from some people working in this this for instance this biologist for instance says that what is profitable effects or even determines what is scientifically true and where he is coming from is that if if these corporations are as powerful and as influential as they actually are they can they can determine the funding for research also so these companies have control the funding for research and naturally they are going to fund only projects which support their findings or or their interests and so there is you have much greater research proving that genetic modification is good rather than vice versa and things like that there are cases of researchers being being obstructed and they have had to go through lot of misery because they they went against these corporations you can read that material it is on the open internet and you can form your own opinions but again I I would like everybody to think whether you feel comfortable handing over the entire control of yours and your country's food resources in the hands of a few corporations no matter how good they are because after all corporations are run by human beings and human beings maybe one person is good but what about the next person one CEO of that company may be good what about the next one so it it is not a good idea to do that having food resources should be in the control of farmers and of consumers so and it should be distributed so that no one person can play too much mischief now the modern agriculture is heavily dependent on the use of agro chemicals and the pesticides particularly have got very serious health implications in all over the world it is estimated that something like 25 million agricultural workers in developing countries are poisoned by pesticides in India suicides by farmers sometimes consuming poison are consuming the pesticide itself are very common and are a big national problem there is this video it is a little long so I am not showing it I have I have some very interesting videos later for for you but this video talks about cotton and starting from how it is grown how the farmer has to go into considerable amount of debt to acquire the agro chemicals and he has to poor farmers do not have you know they do not have bank accounts they cannot go to walk to any bank and say oh give me a loan of 5 lakh rupees so they have to borrow from money lenders or from the pesticide merchants themselves and the interest rates are extremely high for them they are not the standard bank interest rates they are extremely high moreover these people are quite illiterate and even even if the whether the interest is high or low I do not think they are capable of calculating it on their own of how much they owe and things like that sometimes they have to hypothesize their land and when they are unable to pay up so they go into the so much of debt in the beginning of the season and then depending on the weather the crop may either be a great success or it may be totally destroyed and if it is destroyed then there is no revenue coming out of your farm and you go into debt and you have to borrow more and more until finally the farmer cannot pay up and he decides to unfortunately end his life so this is how this this problem actually gets so big this video tells you about all those various aspects of how the farmer goes to the market and even in the in the market he is not the person in control the prices are decided by the traders and the traders probably look at the world market and determine the prices they look at their own interest and the world market and they fix the prices there and the farmer really has no security so if he cannot sell his product at at a decent price when he has actually gone into debt in order to produce that then his his finances are in a very precarious position the use of pesticide has been argued by some people to be even in violation of the constitution which article 47 says that the the state shall endeavor to bring about prohibition and consumption except for medicinal purposes of things that are injurious to health and pesticides are injurious to health there there is there is no no doubt that pesticides are poisonous I mean just imagine if I invited you to to dinner and while the table is laid before you as you are just about to eat food I say just hold on one second and I spray some pesticide on it and say that just making sure that there are there are no diseases in it so I'm disinfecting it would that work it would not as a child I had this question I was told as a child that the the gardening pesticides that were kept in one particular cupboard that I was I was not supposed to go there is not supposed to touch it I was not supposed to open that cabinet because it is poison and I understood that it is poison but then I was confused that the poison if I directly touch it it is poison but if it is if it is sprayed on garden vegetables and if I eat those vegetables it is not poison so I could not figure out how come it ceases to be a poison when it is sprayed on vegetables fresh vegetables and by the way just simply washing with water does not remove some of those pesticides so conventional agriculture is associated with many more impacts like the devastation of natural ecosystems all those points that I listed in that table they apply they conventional agriculture is so popular because it benefits large corporations and the middlemen but it impoverishes the poor farmer and makes the consumer unhealthy so the farmer the middleman and us the consumer so on both ends there is there are problems and the middleman gets fatter so that is that is the condition now with climate change yields are likely to reduce so this this map shows the regions in where the yields are likely to reduce in Pakistan is the condition might be very serious Pakistan Afghanistan in India also the yields are likely to to reduce assuming that the world warms up by about 3 degrees it would this would be the situation so for these countries which are likely to be adversely affected due to global warming we really have to find a solution for that. Conventional agriculture does not help reducing land degradation in fact it worsens land degradation that is why I actually showed that slide so we have lots of impacts on the land and South Asia we have 50 percent of the land that is degraded in China you have 27 percent this shows degraded a map of soil degradation so the reduction in yields is partly due to that now there are many causes of soil degradation land degradation industrialization intensive agricultural practices over grazing over exploitation for fuel wood and deforestation so these are the various contributions are shown for different continents and you can go through that later this is a very nice video which introduces to you and I think it is definitely worth showing to students I am not going to show this video or maybe I should because you know that puts places in context everything else so this this video actually places in context the the fact that soil is the basis of of the our food production systems and that soil is a living entity it must be protected and then there are various ways of soil degradation and agriculture the modern agricultural methods are actually causing large amounts of damage so it will it will help us understand rest of the things it also happens to be soil also happens to be the basis of successful organic agricultural methods so successful organic agriculture actually begins from the soil it does not I think in yesterday's session there was one one point of do you allow a problem to first manifest and then find a solution or do you try to avoid the problem coming up in the first place so if the soil is fed and if the soil is healthy then you avoid many of the problems like pest attack and things like that if your plants are healthy to begin with so that is also the basis of organic agriculture and therefore from both perspectives I think this showing this video is a good idea so this video kind of in a in a nutshell talks about soil erosion and various methods of protecting the soil there are there are some more things that I will discuss in that I was just going through the chat box and there are a number of questions that have come I will I will try to answer at least some of them. Chastra University is excellent the what is written over here is that we depend only on some 15 crops to satisfy roughly 90 percent of the the world's food requirements so they are basically they are rice, wheat, potato, maize and some others you know only 15 crops which supply the bulk of our food requirements now that is in my opinion that is a very very dangerous thing if we if we depend only on fewer crops if some disease attacks a certain crop or if you know global climate change promises to to pose very new challenges if some crops if these few crops fail we we can have deaths of people starvation deaths in millions whereas there are so many other domesticated crops there are some 50,000 varieties according to what he is saying I also have a similar number roughly 50,000 odd species that are already domesticated and then there are there are so many other varieties which have not been domesticated but can can potentially be be used so more research needs to go into that and for for the already domesticated varieties it is a matter of we we choosing to to depend on other varieties also I will I will talk a little about that some in just a short while but thank you very much Shastra University for Tanjavar Shastra University Tanjavar for sharing that so really interesting okay what what I think indirectly came up in the video was that the soil is a major carbon sink the soil can hold large quantities of carbon in the biomass above the soil as well as under the soil the the root mass as well as the decomposing humus that is there so it is the the largest terrestrial carbon reservoir in interaction with the atmosphere so if you plow the soil and you expose it to the hot sun what happens is the surface temperature of the soil increases drastically and firstly the soil dries out and then at at high temperature and exposure to sunlight it oxidizes the the organic carbon that is present in the soil so the soil loses carbon even the soil loses carbon not only is it emitting CO2 to the atmosphere which is worsening the greenhouse effect but it is it is also losing the capacity to hold water so the fertility is also lost so then you have to add chemical fertilizers so that is not the the best practice I had mentioned and this is a slide which talks about loss of crop and wild biodiversity which we have very limited time so I cannot talk much about it somebody has also mentioned about that but I will I will show you I think more than me talking if I show you a small video of Dr. Vandana Shiva I am sure you can find a lot more reading material through her she has her own website and she runs an organization Navadanya as Professor Parthasarthi had mentioned yesterday so this is only a short video there are many videos about Vandana Shiva and about how she has been fighting the case of India against other forces which want to patent our traditional crops and traditional variety they basically want to own our biodiversity so she has been very vocal and she has contributed immensely to this area she has talked a lot about GMOs and issues related to genetic engineering so the things that I cannot cover in this session I would point you to her and many there are many other people also who are working on Moodle I can share with you some more resources this video is talking about seeds the importance of importance of seeds and how we we need to make sure that farmers are always in control of their seeds no foreign multinational company can control our seed so that is that is the important thing okay so I am I am almost done for this session what Dr. Vandana Shiva and many others in in our country are are saying is that genetic engineering is not the way to go it is not in the interest of our country in the long run and there are alternatives there are alternative ways and if you if you go to navadanya.org you will see how she has actually used women power to save the seeds and to to grow food and there are I saw some of the comments in the chat about the productivity of organic systems I am going to definitely deal with that issue right after the break the let me say this I have visited several organic farms which which are quite well known and all of them the the most important feature among them was high productivity so I think if you do it right you will get good productivity the same applies with conventional agriculture it is not like you you you just simply dump some chemicals and some fertilizers and you are assured of good productivity even with conventional farming there is a there is an element of skill there is an element of getting it right so that applies in organic farming also in organic farming it is it is I do not think it is correct to say that organic farming yields are low or have to be low it is not so in my opinion at least in my observation it has not been so so I will give you cases and in in one in a couple of videos they will actually mention what their yield is and then you can run that against data from which you can get on the internet and check for yourself whether that yield is good or bad okay industrial agriculture actually has a number of external costs which are not included in the in the price of the product it is it may appear that the food that that we obtain through industrial agriculture is cheap but actually it is not so considering so many people who who are poisoned considering the waterways that that get polluted with fertilizers fertilizer residues as well as pesticides and things like that the land that gets degraded if all those several external costs are included in the price then in the long run industrial agriculture is is not something that will provide us with food security and there are there are many things that I have I have listed over here you can read through that in your own time but definitely I would recommend a couple of videos the one that I showed you 100 percent cotton that is a very nice video this one is more comprehensive Nero's guests this is by very eminent journalist P. Sainath he has covered this entire aspect of the plight of the farmers how they get into debt how they are forced to commit suicide and how the the corporations are are basically trying to monopolize it is a it is a longish video maybe not not convenient to show in your class but you can definitely see it for yourself and it will clarify many aspects about Indian agriculture as it is today and what are the situations of the farmers there is the farmers you know they end up getting into a debt trap DEBT and it also becomes a debt trap for them this was a study in Central India on onion and potato farming and I have I have summarized the results of how how is it that farmers get into trouble so I have just summarized that over here and the costs and everything are taken from those references given below and it turns out okay this is what I have summarized from that study so that for different studies it may be slightly different but it says that the input is something like 38,000 rupees per acre if it is self-financed and they are using hired labor there their output would be this much so that profit earned would be very little so if this is going to be the profit earned how can a family of maybe four or five members survive on the farm so invariably they cannot afford hired labor because in agriculture labor costs are very high so they have to use their family labor it means their children cannot go to school or their children end up missing school so it leads to very profound social impacts when such is the case with if their children do not go to school then probably they can make some amount of money but if they if they have borrowed funds to start agriculture and they are financed at very high lending rates then they will end up with a loss if they if they use family labor then the losses will be I mean then it will be a little better now there are these engineered price crashes so the traders they kind of band together and they they either increase or decrease the price in order to enhance their profits and farmers suffer terribly because of that I had a friend in somewhere close to Nasik he had a farm over there and he he had to literally because the prices crashed in the year that he had a bumper crop he could not sell that and the entire truck loads of his entire crop of cauliflower rotted and you know he he basically quit farming after that so all these issues you know kind of work together and that is why farmers get into trouble at the end of the day if you see it is the corporations which get more benefit than farmers which constitute 70 percent of India so more than half of the benefits are going to corporations and less than half are going to to India and farmers of India so industrial agriculture according to not just me but according to many people who are working in this field is is actually not going to be a solution but it might actually increase food insecurity due to all these things that we covered so far so let us meet after the break thank you