Green Farming in India: Issues and Policy Perspective

Abstract

The organic farming system has been used in India since ancient times and is largely focused on achieving sustainable agricultural output in a clean, unpolluted environment. Organic production methods employ natural resources to harness desired agricultural production for human consumption, keeping the ecosystem and ecology alive and in good health. The environmental focus of organic production is on using naturally occurring resources as inputs, such as organic wastes; crop, animal, and farm wastes, aquatic wastes, other biological materials, and advantageous microbes; biofertilizers/biocontrol agents to release nutrients to crops and protect them from insect pests and diseases for increased agricultural production. In 187 nations, organic farming is practiced, and at least 3.1 million farmers used organic practices to manage 72.3 million hectares of agricultural land. Even though India is home to 44% of the world’s certified organic farmers, the country’s overall certified organic cultivation area, at 2.3 million hectares represents just 3% of the world’s total area of 72.3 million hectares under organic agriculture. Against this backdrop, the objective of the present study is to evaluate the current scenario of organic farming in India. To accomplish this, the study will investigate the causality between organic production, the area cultivated under organic production, the number of organic producers, and biofertilizer production by using Granger causality, the augmented Dickey-Fuller test used to find out the stationarity of data. After finding out the causal relationship between variables, the ARDL model was used to measure the short-term relationship between variables. The ARDL long run form and bound test was used to analyse the long-term relationships. Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, Annual reports of the Ministry of Agriculture, International Federation of Organic Farming Movements, International Trade Centre, National Programme of Organic Production, and Organic Industry Market Report are indeed the sources of secondary data used in the study.