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Real Green Revolution-I
:Local Food Security
The Real Green Revolution is about achieving local food security.
Which villager wants to depend on Kansas, or Punjab for that matter,
for his or her grain?
A local food security approach attempts to help farmers to produce
enough for themselves, even if they cannot generate a huge marketable
surplus. This means ensuring good agriculture in all types of villages
and farms.
In fact, this is the kind of food security every farmer yearns
for. And this exactly is the kind of food security large irrigation
systems cannot provide.
Canals do not reach everywhere, and - notoriously - salinise the
soil in command areas. Irrigation pumps can only make the groundwater-table
fall. Big dams create only small pockets of Green Revolution-style
agricultural production. The present structure of agricultural production
allows only for water-intensive crop regimes driven by market-based
(and not people-based) demand-supply logic.
Large-scale irrigation systems make sense only from the perspective
of National Food Security (so-called).
For local food security, we need rainwater
harvesting.
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