Geospatial Value Impact — Agriculture Sector
With a total food production of 960 million tonnes (MT), the estimated Gross Value Added (GVA) by agriculture, forestry, and fishing to the Indian economy stood at INR 19.48 lakh crore (USD 254.17 billion) in FY 2020. Contributing 20% to GDP (FY 2020) and generating employment for more than 55% of the Indian population, agriculture is one of the important sectors of the Indian economy. India is the top producer of milk, spices, pulses, tea, cashew, and jute, as well as the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, oilseeds, fruits and vegetables, sugarcane, and cotton in the world. Covering about 45% of the peninsula, agricultural activities in India have been increasing contribution to the world food trade every year.
At the same time, India continues to face complex challenges which are a cause of concern for the growing economy. As the second-largest populated country in the world, demand for food continues to grow while agricultural yields are 25% lower than world averages for major crops. India uses at least twice the amount of water to grow one unit of food versus comparable countries like China and South Africa. Nearly 80% of India’s fresh water is used in agriculture and over half of India’s cultivated land is under water-intensive crops. Averaging at 6.8% of the total production, agricultural losses amounted to more than INR 1,30,000 crores (USD 16.96 billion) in 2020. Desertification or land degradation due to over-cultivation, deforestation, and soil erosion is costing USD 48.8 billion to the country’s exchequer annually impacting 2.5% of GDP every year.
Challenges
As per the estimates, demand for food grain is expected to increase to 355 MT by 2030 (as against 296 MT in 2020). As India strives to achieve grain self-sufficiency, agricultural production continues to be resource-intensive and regionally biased. Climatic uncertainties clubbed with unsustainable livelihoods are pushing the population away from agriculture. With heavy dependence on water-guzzling crops, the gap between water demand and supply is widening every day. With 30% of India’s land area already degraded, deteriorating soil and water quality is impacting crop yields while posing a threat to food security. Supply chain inconsistencies are resulting in large-scale wastage of agricultural produce. Poor farm incomes and sluggish adaptability to changing times compounded by climate change and natural disasters are making agriculture tougher by the day. With the increasing population, pressure on the conversion of cultivable land will continue to increase. Demand for producing ‘more and better with less’ will keep increasing.
The Indian farming community has been slow in taking the advantage of scientific methods and technologies. While farm mechanization in US and Europe is over 95%, India is way behind them at 40%. The uptake of information technologies continues to be very low at 10% in India. The comparatively lower position of India’s agricultural production and crop yields vis-à-vis other nations, depleting natural resources, and global warming, bring to the fore, the need for adopting science-based sustainable approaches, without which India as a nation will stare at tougher times.
The need of the hour is to embrace technologies that can provide better situational awareness and, actionable intelligence and aid the farming community with informed decisions. There is a need for technologies that can aid in improving crop lifecycle from farm to fork, assist in optimizing the use of water for irrigation, minimize wastage of produce while providing oversight of the uncertainties and help farmers take the right action in the right time.
Geospatial technology and its applications
Given the complex multidisciplinary challenges that the agriculture sector faces, geospatial infrastructure, through intuitive mapping and analytics, offers unmatched capabilities for revealing deeper insight in relationships and patterns, answering complex questions, and supporting informed decisions for fostering sustainable agriculture. With the proliferation of location information, improved access to geospatial data, rapid data acquisition through UAVs and affordability, geospatial technologies demystify the complexities and aid in unlocking the value across the agricultural value chain.
Advanced GIS capabilities including spatial modeling and predictive analysis using artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics provide enhanced location-specific intelligence for the accurate forecast of likely scenarios to mitigate, plan and respond. With high proliferation of the internet in rural India, mobile GIS tools play a vital role in democratizing geo-information and empowering farmers with small holdings with real-time information for informed decisions and risk mitigation.
Geospatial Value Impact
Playing a central role in bringing together data on land, soils, geology, weather, crops, water, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, supply chain, markets, and market conditions through a common visual language, geospatial technologies provide powerful tools to plan, design, monitor and manage activities across the crop life cycle. By integrating location intelligent IoT-based devices, and farm infrastructure, geo-enabled precision agriculture offers transformative economic potential for sustainable climate-smart-agriculture, improving crop yields by 18–25%. Integrating location intelligent supply chain infrastructure with financing and farming activities on a GIS platform can strengthen the market linkages and reduce losses by 25–30%, in addition to significant fuel savings and reduction of carbon footprint.
This, clubbed with the economic value offered by geospatial technologies in supporting sustainable agricultural practices including land restoration and natural resource management, makes a significant impact on the agricultural economy. A conservative estimate of the Geospatial Value Impact (GVI) on the agricultural sector is given in the table below.
Being vital to the economy, the role of the agriculture sector is critical in achieving food security, increasing farmer income, and generating employment opportunities. Harnessing geospatial technologies for sustainable agriculture is a huge untapped opportunity to improve productivity and realizations in the sector. With the impact of climate change becoming tougher by the day, geo-enabled digital transformation is the need of the hour to combat the multifaceted challenges. Geospatial infrastructure also provides evidence-based insights backed with scientific rigor to strengthen governance and regulatory framework which can quicken much-needed agricultural reforms in the country.
[1] Considering a conservative 5% improvement in crop yields and a 5% reduction in wastage
[2] Assuming that INR 100 per person per month can be passed on as a productivity improvement benefit and reaches 50% of the country’s population
[3] Based on the assumption that currently cost of environmental degradation in India is pegged at INR 3.75 trillion (USD 48.9 billion) and proper planning can reduce the degradation at least by 2% per annum
Originally published at https://www.geospatialworld.net on May 5, 2022.
