In July, India's agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, talked about the role of the private sector in agricultural research and human-resource development in the country's food industry. His audience was made up of participants of an 'industry meet' put on by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). Pawar explained the conventional approach of public-sector agricultural research and development, which has been to take responsibility for setting priorities, mobilising resources, research, development and dissemination. He then explained that agricultural extension – the education of farmers in new techniques and technologies, which has been neglected for several years – is 'no longer appropriate'. Instead, he urged the adoption of public-private partnerships, through which public-sector institutes (such as those in the ICAR network) can 'leverage valuable private resources, expertise or marketing networks that [the farmers] otherwise lack'.
This is the bald commercial reasoning behind the creation of new units to oversee business planning and development in five key ICAR institutes. They will now tackle intellectual-property management, commercialisation of research, find investors and begin businesses. For better or worse, India's national agricultural-research system has decided to package and price its publicly-funded output. How will this new approach affect what India's farming households grow and what its urban consumers eat? Currently, the public agricultural research and extension system consists of ICAR and its various institutes, as well as the networks overseen by the state agricultural institutes (SAUs). ICAR funds and manages a vast network of research institutes, packed with scientific personnel at all levels. This is very important to the success of a corporate programme, in order to concentrate funds, food handling and transport systems, and to gain increasing control over what the food industry calls 'farm to fork' – the full process from the field to the consumer.
The so-called area, production and yield (APY) model of measuring agriculture in India has long been the dominant one, focusing on growth in irrigated areas, crop production in tons and yield per hectare. In following this model, central and state planners, leveraging the reach and influence of the national agricultural-research system, have automatically tended towards technology as an enabling factor and the economics of the organised food industry. This strong bias exists as a legacy of the successful years of the Green Revolution, when the massive laboratory-led creation of high-yield varieties proceeded in step with massive irrigation programmes and farm-mechanisations schemes. In the process, they have turned the needs of small-scale cultivating households into 'programmes' and 'schemes', so that these small-scale farmers become 'consumers of technology' as opposed to being recognised as holders of traditional agricultural knowledge.
This proclivity suits (and has been carefully influenced by) the global agribusiness corporations and their clients. 'Closing the yield gap' on the massive scale needed, they say, requires massive investments in rural infrastructure and institutions plus technology transfer. In India, as in much of the rest of Southasia, the agricultural extension system is unable to respond to new challenges, because it is institutionally crippled and has suffered from deliberate neglect. The Krishi Vikas Kendras, for instance, meant for district-level extension activities, have become moribund, despite being envisioned as the frontline providers of technologies and methods developed by the NARS. Yet the impact of this concentration of agricultural control and food-systems management on urban India is not discussed by either the Ministry of Agriculture or the Ministry of Food and Consumer Affairs.