Major bottlenecks among them, are lack of resources such as water nutrient and good quality planting material, improper management of pests and diseases and poor harvest management of the produce.
As against the world average of 172 kg/ha chemical fertilisers, Indian agriculture consumes only about 70 kg/ha. The average fertiliser consumption would be even lower, if the fertiliser applied for three important crops like paddy, wheat and sugarcane were kept out of the average. Thus, a majority of the crops suffer due to nutritional deficiency.
In the areas
of intensive agriculture such as Punjab, Hariyana, Tarai region of Uttar
Pradesh and the sugarcane belts in the
rest of the country, excessive doses of imbalanced fertiliser application has
been a problem of serious concern.
These areas also suffer from excessive use
of water for irrigation, when
soils turn alkaline or saline and
the fertilisers applied to the
soils are not available for the crops. Biotechnology can help to
solve these problems in
two ways. Firstly, for crops where fertiliser
application is very low, bio-fertilisers can fix atmospheric nitrogen and
provide micro-nutrients useful to
plant growth. Use
of blue-green algae
has also been beneficial to rice crop. Microbes such as mycorrhizae have been
helpful to overcome
the stress from
drought and diseases. Increase
in the cost of fertilisers
even in Western countries
has forced their farmers to
use bio-fertilisers for many crops.
In a
developing country with overflowing food grain stocks, a liberalizing economy
set on a growth path, and techno-bureaucracy willing to pursue new technologies
with a reasonable open mind, the situation seems ripe for agricultural
biotechnology. The investment in this sector is picking up and the private
sector has been given a pivotal role along with synergistic public investment.
Top Indian policy makers argue that biotechnology will provide food security to
the hungry but do not explain as to why
should hunger exist at all in India with its overflowing food stocks, if the
issue was only supply! Activists also make a case for biotechnology so long as
it increases productivity. The case of Bt cotton in Gujarat shows that this new
technology indeed increases productivity, profits of the farmer and eliminates
the need for excessive sprays of chemical pesticides.
India with its emerging democracy and growing economic power has seen a
shift in the last few decades in the way business is conducted. The Federal
government is more willing to venture into a market economy by privatizing financial
institutions. As a consequence of this move, capital is more readily available
to the common people and is being invested in new businesses. India, on the
other hand, is also one of the largest agriculture-based economies in the
world. With her agriculture output continuing to decline for the last decade,
many factors have been attributed to this decline: the effects of disease,
pests, and weeds, unprecedented climatic conditions, limited water, poor land
conditions, drought, and heat. But a recent report by the National Commission
on Farmers strongly suggests that the hope for the future increases in
productivity, sustainability, and profitability for the farmer lies in
agricultural biotechnology.
Broadly speaking, biotechnology is any technique that uses living organisms or
substances from these organisms to make or modify a product for a practical
purpose (Box 2). Biotechnology can be applied to all classes of organism - from
viruses and bacteria to plants and
animals - and it is becoming a major feature of modern medicine, agriculture
and industry. Modern agricultural biotechnology includes a range of tools that scientists
employ to understand and manipulate the genetic make-up of organisms for use in
the production or processing of agricultural products.
All living
organisms have the ability to improve themselves through natural means in order
to adapt to changing environmental conditions. However, it takes hundreds of
years before any detectable improvement is obtained. Man then learned how to
domesticate and breed plants in order to develop crops to his own liking and
needs using various means including biotechnology. Biotechnology is defined as a
set of tools that uses living organisms (or parts of organisms)to make or
modify a product, improve plants, trees or animals, or develop microorganisms for
specific uses. Agricultural biotechnology is the term used in crop and
livestock improvement through biotechnology tools. This monograph will focus
only on agricultural crop biotechnology. Biotechnology encompasses a number of
tools and elements of conventional breeding techniques, bioinformatics,
microbiology, molecular genetics, biochemistry, plant physiology, and molecular
biology.
The biotechnology tools that are important for
agricultural biotechnology include: -
- · Conventional plant breeding –
- · Tissue culture and micropropagation
- · Molecular breeding or marker assisted selection
- · Genetic engineering and GM crops
- · Molecular Diagnostic Tools
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