Search Results

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of the works done on contemporary themes in agricultural geography such as cropping pattern, crop combinations, crop diversifications, agricultural productivity and efficiency. Agricultural geographers have remained widely engaged with these themes largely because of their relevance at the local levels under the fast increasing international market pressures. That is why the scholars seem to have paid much more attention on producing local and regional level studies. Very few studies have been conducted on aspects like crop combinations, agricultural productivity. Also the role of urban generated processes in the transformation of cropping patterns and their influence on agricultural productivity in many parts of the country could not get due attention.

During the past three decades under review (1980–2010), agriculture in Odisha state has been reeling under the subsistence nature of its operation, relatively small size of land holdings, high incidence of indebtedness, inadequate and poor irrigation infrastructure, limited access to credit and other crucial agricultural inputs, weak market linkages, recurrence of flood and drought, concentration of tribal population, although a preponderant majority of state’s population still rely on it for income and livelihood. The contribution of agriculture to the state’s total GSDP has declined from 45.2 per cent in 1980–81 to 16.0 per cent in 2009–10 and the level and growth of agricultural productivity have also suffered a huge setback. In this context, the present chapter aims at outlining the policies and issues of changing cropping pattern and crop diversification that are likely to impact growth, productivity, and sustainability of agriculture in Odisha. It analyses the constraints of Odisha’s agriculture and its potential role in meeting the challenges of sustainable livelihood, poverty reduction, and food security, especially that of the rural masses. The chapter identifies a series of measures to scale up the overall productivity of crops and income of the majority of farmers and agricultural labourers in the state.

This chapter examines in detail the process of agricultural development in Palanpur over seven decades. It identifies the factors that have played a significant role in shaping this process. The chapter shows that the evolution of agriculture in Palanpur involved, and was shaped by, the interactions amongst multiple factors, including demographic change, expansion of irrigation, intensification of cultivation, changing cropping patterns, farm mechanization, growing non-farm employment, marketization of factors of production, and improvements in formal credit supply. The importance of interactions between agriculture and non-agriculture, as well as within agriculture, is highlighted with respect to changing cropping patterns and intensification of mechanization and irrigation. It is also seen in institutional dynamism such as, for example, the emergence of new forms of tenancy. In providing a structured description of the changing contours of agriculture, important insights are obtained into how lives and livelihoods have changed in Palanpur.

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is long-standing, probably covering thousands of years. Only in the decades since the 1960s, however, has opium been cultivated and transformed into rough morphine and heroin for export to the world market. Local men have traditionally smoked opium, whereas women eat it. To understand who cultivates opium in Afghanistan and Pakistan and why they cultivate it is the objective of this chapter. The volume of production and spatial distribution of opium cultivation is also discussed. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan have a long tradition of ingesting stimulants, intoxicants, and depressants. These ingestibles are discussed in the context of common consumption and their great cultural, spatial distribution. A brief synopsis of the current scale of opium production in Afghanistan is given. With the destruction of irrigation facilities since October 8, 2001, in the major opium-growing regions of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban Pashtuns reside, it is unlikely that cultivators will stop growing opium, the most highly valued crop. On the contrary, 2002 levels have soared to 1990s levels. In 2000, unpublished reports recorded that two Afghan provinces alone, Helmand and Nangarhar— home to the hard-core Pashtun Taliban and former anti-Soviet, U.S.-backed mujaheddin—produced 79 percent of Afghanistan’s production, which is 72 percent of the world’s opium supply. By 2001, the United Nations Drug Control Programme said that the 1999 production total of 4,581 tons had diminished to a 2002 total of 3,276 tons, and as a consequence of a Taliban enforcement program due to overproduction the amount had dwindled to 185 tons in 2001. These late estimates are not definitive because of the wholesale civic disruption in the poppy-growing regions. International heroin prices have not reflected the dramatic alleged reduction of opium production, with a gram of heroin in London holding steady at around $100. Interdiction programs in Central Asia have confiscated substantial amounts of heroin (Lubin, Klaits, and Barsegian 2002), but the supply continues, leading one to conclude that much of the bumper crop of opium in 1999 and in previous years was held in storage. The Taliban could claim that their eradication program diminished production, but in actual fact there was a glut of opium on the market and the Taliban’s program was a smokescreen in an effort to raise the market price. The 2002 harvest indicates that vast areas of southern Afghanistan were already planted to the levels of the 1990s.