Agriculture

This programme attempts to quantify the contribution of biodiversity in forests, rivers, estuaries and agro-ecosystems to India’s food, nutritional security and livelihoods. The programme also works to enhance agricultural productivity, diversify livelihoods, and increase rural incomes by sustainable use of biodiversity and local ecosystem services.
Biodiversity Based Livelihood Programmes: Promises and Prospects in India
Biodiversity Collaborative / Biodiversity Collaborative
2020
Biodiversity and Agriculture: Will the Twain Ever Meet?
Biodiversity Collaborative / Biodiversity Collaborative
2020
"Can India continue to be biodiverse while feeding its people?" on July 12, 2023. 
Biodiversity Collaborative
12 Jul 2023
A national consultation workshop on “Developing methodology for assessing the contribution of biodiversity to agriculture, food and nutritional…
Biodiversity and Agriculture
12 Mar 2020

About Agriculture

India is endowed with four of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots. Yet, the country continues to face a formidable challenge in conserving its biological resources because of climate change, land use and land cover change, and habitat fragmentation. These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that biodiversity, directly and indirectly, can strongly influence India’s food and nutritional security and the livelihoods of its people. Understanding the myriad processes and networks through which biodiversity relates to, and can potentially contribute to, India’s food security is imperative if the country has to sustainably manage its biological diversity to meet the food security requirements of the country.

As a part the Mission, this programme will address how the larger goals of biodiversity conservation can reconcile with the current agricultural intensification and food production systems in the country. To this end, the programme will develop methodology, using both primary and secondary data, to quantify the role of biodiversity in ensuring food security and enhancing agricultural productivity.

Further, it will develop preliminary estimates of the contribution of biodiversity to India’s food and nutritional security, enhancement of agricultural productivity, diversification of livelihoods, and increment of rural incomes by sustainable use of biodiversity. Finally, the programme will explore and develop a road map for incorporating biodiversity based models of enhancing agricultural productivity, diversifying livelihoods, and increasing rural incomes by sustainable use of biodiversity.

The methodologies developed would be used in field evaluation of the contributions of biodiversity in agriculture in different agro-ecological zones of the country. With such estimates of contribution in place, strategies and policies can be developed for incorporating biodiversity-based models in agriculture in the country. Over and above all, food and nutritional security would be attained throughout India and other agriculture-dependent nations can adopt this programme as their role model in reaching the same goal.