The Deccan Development Society has urged the State government to reconsider its plan to promote crop colonies as the idea might sound interesting on paper, but would have a number of unintended consequences for small and marginal farmers.
The DDS expressed concern that crop colonies would mean monoculture and this would, in turn, go against the critical principal of agro-biodiversity. Once an area is declared as colony for certain kind of crop, the administrative mechanism would work overtime to ensure that only that crop is cultivated and nothing else. This would be against the principle of biodiversity and the government should not take any steps to tamper with it. The State government should, instead, declare Telangana as a millet State and ensure that incentives for conservation of water, biodiversity and nutrition were given to farmers, DDS director P.V. Satheesh said.
Organic culture
He welcomed the State government’s decision to extend cash support of ₹ 4,000 an acre per season to farmers and urged Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao to take steps to declare enhanced support to farmers who tend their crops organically. There was a need for promoting organic culture to avoid unwanted consequences of extensive use of chemical fertilizers. Over 60 per cent land in Telangana was unirrigated and poor soils and application of chemical fertilizers would entail the prospect of these lands turning into deserts. He quoted Punjab in this context where farmers were using four times more fertilizers in fertile alluvial soils than they were using a couple of decades ago for the same yield.
“If this is the consequence of deep soils in Punjab, we can imagine what will happen to the shallow poor soils of Telangana,” he said. The government should promote use of non-chemical alternatives to pesticides as they could be produced by farmers themselves at their household level. In addition to protecting the fertility of the soil, use of non-chemical pesticides would ensure huge savings to farmers. He welcomed the State government’s request to the Centre to bring agriculture under the ambit of national rural employment guarantee scheme claiming that it would save huge inputs that were being incurred by farmers currently.
