Your World Revolves Around a Seed

The foundation element of our entire agricultural system is the seed. Our enormous crop diversity has its own uniqueness that can adapt to evolving agro-climatic conditions. It only took few decades after ‘Green revolution’ to come up with improved hybrid crops. Vegetable seeds in India are viewed as a commodity today. They have a substantial export potential because of two main reasons, first, the country’s agro-ecological diversity and secondly the proximity to the neighbouring Asian markets.

Located to the North of equator, India is the seventh largest country in the world, second most populated nation next only to China. The country can be broadly categorised into three geological regions: the Himalayas and eastern hills, the Indo-Gangetic plain and the Peninsular Shield. Geographically six regions can be outlined: the Great Plains, the mountain zone, the north western gangetic north-eastern region comprising of Brahmaputra and Surma Valleys; the desert region; the central and southern plateau region; and the western and eastern peninsula regions. Furthermore, India is reported to be divided into 20 agro-climatic regions right from Arid ecosystem to Island ecosystem.

The physical diversity of the Indian sub-continent is cost-effectively rewarding and resource augmenting, to follow an approach of diversified and regionally differentiated agriculture. India is one of the few developing countries with crop production potential in almost all land class types-dry, semi and moist semi-arid, sub-humid, humid fluvisols and gleysols. This indeed makes India, a world within the world. Thus there must be no constraint to technological progress in an emerging environment such as India which regards bio-diversity as nature’s bounty.

The facts and figures are worse with respect to scientific manpower resources as the assumption of adequacy and abundance has been so all-encompassing that analysis has not been considered worthwhile. However, authoritative data on scientific manpower resources are not available, studies have conveyed the impression of satisfactoriness, and yet smaller and mid-sized seed companies are investing a lot of time and money into R&D activities by opening the flood gates to many aspiring entry-level scientists.

With congregation of hybrid seeds and best farm practices, the Indian seed companies are eyeing the export markets in SAARC and African countries. Seed producers are cashing in on the poor market infrastructure in the East and West African countries. Namdhari Seeds and some of its competitors have entered the markets in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and SAARC region and have already started conducting field trials in the African markets. The entire seed market in the SAARC region including India is more than Rs 7500 Crore currently and is expected to reach Rs 12,000 Crore by 2014. The absence of hybrid seeds was one of the prime reasons why Indian companies had a major role to play and they got a huge opportunity to establish their presence as most of them had their expertise in bringing out suitable and higher yielding hybrids.

Many small-to-mid and large scale industries usually start with an initial capital with owners and investors having varied agricultural and commercial experience. Usually, the foremost source of financing is self-generated capital, short and long-term bank loans and advances from large seed companies. Most multinational companies have forward looking statements or information that addresses expectations or projections about the future-looking statements. What one has to look at is, these financial statements often include words such as ‘will’, ‘believes’, ‘expects’, ‘estimates’, ‘plans’ and ‘intends’. Even if these words echo our present expectations, these information or statements are not guarantees of expected performance, but involve numerous risks, reservations and assumptions. Risk factors include: fluctuations in energy and raw material prices; failure to develop new products and optimally manage product life cycles; global economic and capital markets conditions; litigations and environmental matters; changes in law and regulations and many such factors involve where a company will not update forward –looking statements from the financial sector or the management.

India has achieved what other developing counties haven’t. Many experts have forecasted that export of agricultural seeds from the country may more than double to Rs. 1,000 crore in the coming years and as many as 38 varieties from India have been registered in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). OECD is a group of 34 countries that guarantees the quality of seeds that can be imported by countries participating in OECD schemes and as many as 57 nations have taken up such schemes.

India approximately exports around Rs. 500-550 crore worth of seeds and the consignment is only going to increase as non-member countries go by this list. Meanwhile, a representative from NSA stated that registration of 38 varieties takes the total number of Indian seeds in the OECD list to 95 and another 118 varieties are in the pipeline for registration with OECD. India’s contribution to the world seed market is one percent and aims to increase the contribution by ten percent of global trade by 2020.

 

Farmer seen spraying pesticide on a vegetable crop.

Seed industry has evolved over the years by adopting and innovating scientific advancements in variety development and quality seed production. The Indian seed market is mainly contributed by the cash crops such as corn, cotton, paddy and wheat, sunflower and millets. In the 2013 financial year, non-vegetable seeds accounted for a major percentage of overall seed market in India and in the coming years the percentage of vegetable seeds might grow higher than the current FY results. This is because the vegetable seed industry was a major and third largest contributor to the hybrid seed industry. Indian farmers have shown their interest and penchant to adopt any new technology which promises higher production and profitability and it is evident from the fact that farmers are willing to invest if and only if technology is promising. According to a popular publication, most these factors led to the higher growth of Indian Seed Industry (around US $ 2000 million) with a potential 60% growth rate.

Moreover, there has been a progressive step by ICAR, a policy decision to provide freely the parental lines of new vegetable hybrids to private seed companies under joint agreements. Thus such targeted approaches by the public sector via collaborating with the private sector will soon meet the national targets. In the mean time, better climate resilient hybrids and varieties need to be developed at the earliest. It’s a healthy sign to see that the private sector has indeed contributed significantly in the development of vegetable seed basket both in terms of hybrids and new crops.

Currently, India is the sixth largest seed industry and it is poised to grow at a rate faster than the global rate. It has made marvellous contribution to enhance productivity through development of superior hybrids and many private companies are aggressively empowering the research and development. However, Indian seed industry needs support and investment from public sector for investment in research and infrastructure. Robust public private partnership models are necessary to serve the farmers better by removing the various productivity constraints through technological interventions.

Private companies today are trying to launch a wide and whole range of crop protection tools, inputs and technologies in India as well as in other agro-based economies in Asia where crop production has to be increased at nearly 2 percent annually. Thus private entities are promoting research, development and movement of quality seed to meet the world’s demand for food, feed, fibre and fuel.

Lastly to improve agricultural production and food security in a sustainable manner, there has to be a long term vision aiming to increase crop productivity, increase earnings and create employment opportunities through self-sufficiency, import substitution and export promotion of quality seeds. However, the primary aim must be to envisage and double the number of precise high yielding varieties by 2020 and thus improved seed production will be increased threefold through formal system. This can only be achieved by: reinforcement of varietal development, discharging and preservation using diverse gene pool both from local and exotic sources, boosting public, private and community ventures in seed multiplication, processing and conditioning through efficient seed quality services. Augmenting the marketing skills of seed entrepreneurs and make suitable investments in seed related infrastructure. Thus, these strategies might help to develop effective and efficient public and private seed related organisation with business culture and to improve and expand the horizon of seed exports.

(Source: As published in the magazine CommodityIndia.com on 08/01/2014)