Economic Survey highlights how agriculture can be India’s growth engine amid trade protectionism & AI
AI), trade protectionism, resource-hoarding, excess capacity and dumping, and onshoring production are restricting the potential of countries to squeeze out growth from manufacturing and services; so the agriculture sector can be a growth engine for India and the world, the Economic Survey 2024 said.
Union Budget and Economic Survey 2024 Live Updates
“A return to roots, as it were, in terms of farming practices and policymaking, can generate higher value addition from agriculture, boost farmers’ income, create opportunities for food processing and exports and make the farm sector both fashionable and productive for India’s urban youth,” noted the survey Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tabled in the Lok Sabha on Monday. “When resolved, the problem areas mentioned above that the current policy configuration has created over the years can become sources of India’s strength and a model for the rest of the world — developing and developed.”
The survey acknowledged that the agriculture sector is one area ripe for, and in need of, a pan-India dialogue on these lines. Agriculture and farmers matter for a nation, and governments in India spend enough resources to look after the farmers well, it noted. “Yet, a case can be made that they can be served better with some re-orientation of existing and new policies. A panoply of policies — by national and sub-national governments — working at cross purposes with each other is hurting farmers’ interests, destroying soil fertility, depleting groundwater, polluting rivers and the environment with nitrous oxide emissions, starving the crops of nutrients and undermining people’s health with a diet rich in sugar and carbohydrates rather than fibre and protein,” the
