FARMERS WANT TO GIVE UP FERTILIZERS BUT NEED POLICY SUPPORT

As India grapples with fresh disruptions to its urea supply chain from the ongoing conflict in West Asia, a recent article - "Farmers want to give up fertilizers but need policy support," published on Scroll.in turns to Dr. Avinash Kishore, Senior Research Fellow in IFPRI's Development Strategies and Governance Unit, for a diagnosis of why appeals for judicious fertilizer use have struggled to translate into real change on the ground.

Dr. Kishore's points out that India's chemical fertilizer use has actually risen 15% even as officials have appealed for restraint, largely because urea prices have been kept artificially low for two decades, a 45 kg bag has cost roughly the same since the mid-2000s. As Dr. Kishore explains in the piece, a farmer today can buy a bag of urea for less than half the rice it would have cost in 2010, making judicious use, or a switch to natural farming, economically irrational despite the environmental and soil-health toll.

The article draws on his insights throughout — from the poor nitrogen-use efficiency plaguing Indian agriculture, to a comparative example of Bangladesh's phased urea price reforms, to his call for aligning farmer incentives with credible scientific recommendations rather than one-off appeals. It's a timely example of IFPRI research and expertise directly shaping the national conversation on fertilizer subsidy reform, natural farming transitions, and food security.

Read the full article here: Farmers want to give up fertilisers but need policy support