Secondary agriculture : sustainability and livelihood in India

This book on ‘Secondary Agriculture’ discusses the goal of doubling farmers’ incomes.

The term ‘secondary’ has a bearing on climate change adaptation and its mitigation, small farm viability and profitability, food security, nutrition, sustainable utilization of natural resources, and optimal usage of produce from primary agriculture and farm incomes.

Promoting secondary agriculture has implications on attaining sustainable development goals, which aim to connect primary, secondary and tertiary sectors by using slack/idle factors of production, such as land and labour, contributing to primary agriculture production, capturing ‘value’ in primary agricultural activities, and generating additional income at the enterprise level.

In context to same, the chapters of this book have been designed to promote secondary agriculture through low-cost skills and technology applications in agriculture and by upscaling knowledge via integrating primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of agriculture.

The motivation behind this book is to address the challenges of biotic and abiotic stresses facing the farming community; to increase farmers income through low-cost skills and technology applications in agriculture; to upscale knowledge by integrating primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of agriculture.   The food processing sector in India is still in a nascent stage with only 8 per cent of the produce being processed as against 80-98 per cent in case of high-income countries (Government of India, 2008, 2010).

The food processing sector is now receiving the boost with the annual growth of 13.2 per cent in registered food processing units during 2004-10 (Government of India, 2011).

Against this backdrop, there is a strong need to strategically handle the situation in order to facilitate a self-sustainable and long-run growth of the sector, which is felt possible by focusing on Secondary Agriculture.

Though not a panacea for all ailments of the primary sector, but it can definitely drive the growth.