Dismantling Barriers to Upscaling Agro-ecological Farming in India

Abstract

With growing recognition of the increasingly destructive impacts of the Green Revolution (GR) the world over, heightened further by COVID-19, there is an urgent need to scale up alternative approaches embedded within the paradigm of agro-ecology. Even so, actual progress on the ground in this direction has been extremely slow. I argue that this is because the entire policy framework governing agriculture continues to be located within the GR paradigm and acts as a multi-pronged impediment to upscaling agro-ecological farming. The paper proposes key policy reforms that could help dismantle these barriers and facilitate, support, and accelerate movement towards agro-ecological farming in India.