‘One day, I went to a little village. An old grandfather of 90 was busy planting an almond tree.
‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ Bent as he was, he turned
around and said: “My son, I carry on as if I should never die.” I replied: “And I carry on as if I
were going to die any minute.”‘

The anecdote from Nikos Kazantzakis, the celebrated Greek philosopher, best explains the
differences in conceptualising policies by those of us advocating polices for primary
producers and those being implemented by India’s establishment. India’s agricultural policies
echo the ‘live for the moment’ mindset, as if there is no tomorrow. Farmers, too, taught by a
defunct agricultural research system and goaded by government policies, are knowingly
farming without a care for future generations. This short-termism possibly takes its cue from
elected representatives whose only objective in life seems to be to get re-elected.

India lacks and, therefore, requires a strategic vision of 25 years of how the world and
national economies might evolve, what skills may be needed and visualise how technologies
would disrupt the workspace, changing demand for nutrition and, finally, how to deal with the
challenges of ageing and climate change. It is only against such a vision that one can judge
whether today’s activities make sense.

In every scenario, other than one in which India is stagnating economically; agricultural
production will fall way short of the country’s nutritional demand. However, the
establishment’s policies imply that India is nutritionally secure and climate change won’t
impact production. Without systems thinking, India is not even ready to identify risks, let
alone explore the opportunities. India not having an agricultural policy speaks more than a
thousand words, though there are streaks of sunshine. After 28 years, the cooperation
ministry has released a new National Cooperative Policy.

As strategic thinker David Niles explains, “It’s not about getting the forecast right — it’s about
having a series of plays ready, so when the unexpected happens, you’re not frozen”.
Scenario planning is not only about predicting the future. It is about training for it, being
prepared to shift course. For example, now without an India-USA trade deal we are in deep
untested muddy waters.

Systems thinking is much more common in areas like military strategy, engineering and even
amongst the judicial system, which decides on litigation by looking at all perspectives. It is
missing in agricultural policy formulation and more-so in agricultural economics.

Making one thing better tends to make other things worse. Increasing fertiliser application for
productivity destroys the soil biome. Applying pesticides to kill insects considered pests kills
other lifeforms too. Supressing prices for consumers decimates farmer livelihoods. Giving
free electricity causes aquifers to dry up. Just as open-ended MSP paddy procurement has
ruined Punjab, free wheat and rice to 2/3 rd  of the Indian population has changed diets and
destroyed biodiversity. Similarly, in the India-USA trade negotiations; shielding Indian
farmers from cheap US farm produce, adversely impacts India’s services and industrial
goods exports, sends stock markets into a tailspin and inhibits private sectors fund raising as
USA ramps up tariffs on India exports.

Relativism has its problems but one cannot resist comparing Israel and India, both founded
in poverty after World War II. Israel spends more than six per cent of its gross domestic

product (GDP) on Research and Development (R&D). This is more than double the global
average. Half of that funding comes from the private sector. Today, Israel has risen to the
ranks of the developed world.

India, in contrast, invests less than one percentage of its GDP in R&D and languishes as a
developing nation. For the erstwhile Planning Commission and its mellowed-down avatar,
the NITI Aayog, both failed to convince their masters to increase R&D funding. Neither do
farmer union leaders seek resources for agricultural R&D, the funding for which has been
shrinking as a percentage of the GDP annually this century.

Israel’s economic success, whether on the farm or the battlefield, came after decades
of focused research on technology. In contrast, for Indian agriculture, the outcomes have
been plagued by decades of political indecisiveness, whether it is the pending seed bill, the
pesticides bill, stalled agriculture market reforms and a host of other issues. This compels
states like Punjab, Haryana and Telangana to enact their own draconian and ineffective
agricultural input regulations. This, along with Supreme Court’s intrusion into scientific
matters, further complicates the field.

Uncertainty on regulations has made the private sector reluctant to invest in agricultural
research. Lack of investments in R&D has driven India’s crop yield lags, which makes its
agricultural produce uncompetitive and impacts its trade negotiations. Take soybean, for
example. India’s best yields are about half of what is available for non-GM varieties
worldwide and three times less than that of GM soybean. Imagine, for a moment, if India
were to achieve comparable yields in just one crop, it could ease the pain of pulses and
edible oil imports. If you are still scratching your head, to why it is not happening, so am I.

Instead, due to unresolved regulatory issues, Indian farmers will not be able to tap the
potential of the India-UK trade deal, as our high-value farm produce will keep failing the
safety tests at UK ports of entry. Same holds true if we were to eventually sign an India-USA
trade deal; irrespective of its fine print, it will not lead to more or diverse farm produce
exports. Later, experts will term issues as non-tariff barriers.

Indian bureaucracy lauds itself by making policies that seem sensible in isolation but which
interact in strange ways to restrain India as a lower-middle income nation. Had a blatantly
reductionist approach of making policy in silos or individual components of complex systems
been replaced by a systems approach which examines the interconnectedness within
complex networks, these issues could have been mitigated if not avoided.

The USA tariffs have rattled the establishment. One can only fervently pray, that this will be
the inflection point in the agricultural space, where it breaks away for its ideological
inhibitions and complacent attitude, from “popularism” to “deliverism”, & finally towards
improving governance and reforms.