Economics of Organic Farming: A Study in Andhra Pradesh

Summary

India achieved self-reliance in food production in the shortest span of time in the World, but despite everything, her traditional agrosystem suffered a great setback, especially owing to the indiscriminate use of chemical fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. This has also lead to erosion of soil fertility, contamination of water resources, and chemical contamination of food grain. In addition to this, India has shown interest on the Genetically Modified Crops (GM Crops) like Bacillus Thurungensis (Bt) cotton etc. which are highly hazardous to the environment and also increased her dependence on the foreign seed companies like Monsanto. Of late, many advanced countries like the USA, Switzerland, Australia, Western Europe etc evinced interest in the organic farming practices which generally assure sustainability of agriculture also to the next generation without any compromise on the food needs of the present generation in particular and natural resources like land, water, and environment in general. It is argued that for sustainability of agricultural sector of any country, organic farming is the only way-out as it assures no contamination of water, no environmental pollution and no degradation of soil fertility.
With this back-ground, it can be concluded that there is an urgent need to address this problem in a holistic approach to encourage farmers at the grassroots level to take up organic farming. Also a review of literature revealed that organic farming is beneficial to the human and other living beings by way of providing qualitative food products, protecting environment etc. However, there is inconclusive
evidence on the economic gaining/ profitability and economic efficiency of organic farming and there exists a dearth of studies on this aspect in the Indian context. Further, except the pioneering works on organic farming at the CMA IIM,Ahmadabad, which confined their attention to the Northern and Western parts of India, on paddy, wheat, sugarcane and cotton and on the efficiency of inputs used in
organic farming and conventional farming and another peripheral study by Prasad which studied several comparative aspects of organic farming and conventional farming, no researcher in India has so far examined location-specific and crop specific aspects relating to economics of organic farming in a State. Hence, a comprehensive study dealing with the economics of organic farming and conventional farming covering different agro-climatic conditions is felt necessary. As such, the present Study addressed itself to fill in this gap by examining the Economics of Organic Farming vis-à-vis Conventional Farming in A.P. covering
paddy, redgram and groundnut among cereals, pulses and oil-seeds in East Godavari, Mahabubnagar and Anantapur respectively. An attempt has been made in this Study
to examine the Economics of Organic Farming in Andhra Pradesh.