Government deeply committed to promoting sustainable and climate-smart agriculture, assures Dr Kale
To realize the vision of climate-smart agriculture, India must embrace climate-smart warehousing or green warehousing, says T K Manoj Kumar, Chairman, Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority, Department of Food and Public Distribution.
“It’s an essential building block for a sustainable and resilient agricultural future,” he said on 19 Oct 2023.
Addressing a FICCI-organized conference on ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’, Kumar emphasized the importance of adopting green warehousing practices in his address.
“To achieve the goal of climate-smart agriculture, we must first ensure uniform and government-enforced standards across the warehousing sector.
“The Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDR) plays a pivotal role in this process by registering warehouses that issue negotiable warehouse receipts.
“Grain storage forms a vital link in climate-smart agriculture, ensuring efficient and sustainable storage practices, reducing waste, and safeguarding the environment for a resilient agricultural future,” he emphasized.
Amee Misra, Senior Economist and head of Policy, UNDP India, observed, “If you look at the Indian agriculture, more than 50% of the population is either directly or indirectly involved or dependent on agriculture and any kind of climate variability or extreme events have consequences not just for agricultural production and productivity, but food security in the country as well.”
“The government is deeply committed to promoting sustainable and climate-smart agriculture,” added Dr V N Kale, Additional Commissioner (M&T), Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.
Highlighting the significance of farm mechanization, Dr Kale stated that “Farm mechanization plays an important role to promote Climate Smart Agriculture. Without farm mechanization, we can’t think about climate smart agriculture.”
“The Climate Agriculture has integration to food systems,” said Dr Manoj Mishra, National Policy Advisor, FAO.
“An investment in climate resilient Agri food systems drive enhancing solutions for Climate Smart Agriculture,” he stressed.
“We have to look out for the climate technologies starting from different varieties, different land management, water use efficiencies,” said Dr A Velmurugan, ADG (Soil & Water Management), ICAR.
Any climate change technology that has to be inclusive, should be farmers-oriented, he pointed out. Fiinews.com
