India’s Biggest Challenge: Saving The Future Of Farming & Agriculture
India is an agricultural country. Agriculture is “only” approx 16 % of GDP but the biggest sector for employment. Officially farmers are only a few 100 million, but after adding family members who help or hardly farm, as also wage laborers, the number of farm workers is likely to be closer to half a billion people. But how many people would India require farming if it were as labor effective as the US for growing crops? Today’s agriculture policies fail to recognize how crop choices, input costs, and the supply chain are intertwined, perpetuating marginal farming. The US is fantastic; with less than 2% of its population growing food sufficient for almost 2 billion people , but much of it they fed to animals. The US also concentrates on many crops suitable for mechanization, but even using metrics from many East Asian countries, with about 10% of the population in agriculture - as opposed to half the workforce for India - that is hundreds of millions of people w