Hybrid Realities: making a new Green Revolution for rice in south India

ABSTRACT

Indian policy makers and agronomists often argue that hybrid rice varieties can help raise aggregate yields to address food security and improve rural incomes. Indian farmers, however, have proved hesitant to embrace this technology. To explain the disjuncture, this paper analyses the case of a publicly developed and promoted hybrid variety in southern Karnataka. It highlights how, within the context of growing social polarisation and an increasingly water-scarce agrarian environment, many smallholders found the hybrid unsuited to cultivation strategies that increasingly sought to minimise risk. The paper therein further illustrates the limits of technological solutions to contemporary agrarian distress.

KEYWORDS:

• Hybrid rice
• new Green Revolution
• political agronomy
• political ecology
• India

Acknowledgements

The author kindly acknowledges the pivotal support and helpful comments of Suhas Bhasme, S. Manjunath, Eli Scheinman, Susanne Soederberg, Sébastien Rioux, the journal editors and two anonymous reviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Marcus Taylor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies and School of Environmental Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. He researches and teaches on the political ecology of development, with a focus on agriculture, labour and livelihoods. His recent books include The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation (Routledge 2015) and Global Labour Studies (with Sébastien Rioux, Polity Press, 2018).

Notes

1 See http://irri.org/ir8 (accessed Feb 25, 2018).

2 IRRI’s data for 2014 puts average Indian yields at 3.62 tonnes per hectare and Chinese yields at 6.75. These differentials are reflective primarily of the more widespread availability of irrigation in China. Historically, the greater use of hybrids in the latter was driven by the authoritarian nature of governmental policy that mandated hybrid use on food security grounds in the 1980s (Janaiah 2002).

3 VC Farm scientists note that KRH-2 was well received and commercially successful in northern India where aromatic rice is the norm, as corroborated by (Janaiah 2002).

4 At the time of research, negotiations over the commercialisation of KRH-4 had been on-going for longer than expected by researchers with the private sector reportedly seeking to strike a hard bargain.

5 In the neighbouring village of Alabujanahalli a socio-economic survey showed that, for small and marginal land owning households, between 61 and 81 percent of their outstanding loans came from informal sources (Bhavani 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant.