Sustainable agricultural intensification in the face of urbanisation, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic in India

One of the central challenges in current farming systems is to increase agricultural productivity while preserving ecosystems. Achieving a ‘sustainable intensification’ of agriculture is crucial, particularly in developing countries in Asia and Africa, in view of population growth, rapid urbanisation, food and nutrition insecurity, poverty, environmental degradation and climate change. Key to the concept of sustainable intensification is to increase agricultural productivity without expanding the area used for agricultural production, while reducing the pressure on natural resources and contributing to ecosystem preservation. South Asia is one of the most rapidly growing and urbanising regions in the world and continues to struggle with food and nutrition insecurity. This is despite considerable progress that has been achieved since the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution and its policies promoted farming technologies that proved to be efficient in increasing productivity, but that can have detrimental effects for the environment in the long-term. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has also raised discussions about the potential of more sustainable agricultural systems to enhance the resilience of farming systems to shocks. Scientific evidence suggests that sustainable intensification does not provide a one-size-fits-all solution and that the factors that incentivise smallholder farmers to adopt sustainable farming technologies are context-specific. Farmers’ adoption behaviour also changes over time, but few studies look at adoption as a dynamic process. Moreover, even though the potential economic-ecological trade-offs of sustainable agricultural practices for farmers and ecosystems are increasingly studied, they are not yet well understood. There is especially little evidence from urbanising areas, which exhibit distinct characteristics that change the framework conditions under which farmers operate. This dissertation contributes to addressing these research gaps focusing on a rapidly urbanising region in India that struggles with environmental degradation, resource scarcity and climate change. The main objectives are threefold. First, to examine how urbanisation affects the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices by peri-urban farmers. Second, to analyse the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic for agricultural management decisions by farm households. Finally, to investigate trade-offs between intensive and sustainable farm management practices in view of biodiversity and crop yields as well as urbanisation. The primary data used in this dissertation were collected in the rural-urban interface of Bangalore, a mega-city in South India, between 2016 and 2022. The data collection was implemented as part of the interdisciplinary Research Unit FOR2432/2 “Social-ecological systems in the Indian rural-urban interface: Function, scales and dynamics of transition”, which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Initially, a sample of 1,275 farm and non-farm households were sampled using a multi-stage stratified sampling approach of which 764 were farm households. The further data collection between 2020 and 2022 was decisively affected by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and reduced the sample sizes in the data used for the essays of this dissertation. The first essay analyses how urbanisation, exposure to weather variability, awareness of climate change, connection with institutional actors and other household- and farm characteristics are associated with the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. In the analysis, we use panel data from two rounds of household surveys in the rural-urban interface of Bangalore in 2016/17 and 2020. We complement this with rainfall data and with data extracted from satellite images on the percentage of built-up area in the study area during both survey years. This allows us to directly measure changes in urbanisation over time. Using 604 observations from 302 farm households, we estimate random effects probit models with the Mundlak approach. This enables us to control for unobserved time invariant heterogeneity across households. We find that urbanisation is related to a decrease in the likelihood that farmers adopt integrated pest management, soil fertility management and an integrated package of several practices. The results highlight that farmers adapt their decision making to irregularities in rainfall. Market integration generally facilitates adoption, but our results indicate that informal marketing arrangements facilitate adoption in contrast to formal arrangements. Extension services are negatively related to adoption, suggesting that the focus of extension provided in the peri-urban area of Bangalore might currently lie on promoting technologies for agricultural intensification, rather than resource conservation. The second essay examines changes in agricultural labour supply of farm households in response to the Indian nationwide lockdown imposed in March 2020 in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The nationwide lockdown lasted until the end of May and was one of the most stringent lockdowns worldwide. For farm households in urbanising areas that typically rely on a diversified livelihood portfolio, the simultaneous closure of agricultural markets and off-farm income opportunities posed a particular challenge. We examine how the nationwide lockdown affected farm households’ agricultural labour supply and what role pre-Covid-19 livelihood strategies played for these changes. We use data from 351 farm households from a baseline face-to-face survey administered in the two months directly before the nationwide lockdown (February and March 2020) and a follow-up phone survey administered in the last two weeks of the lockdown. We show that on average farm households reduced their daily on-farm labour supply by almost 40 percent. While being a household that was integrated into crop markets pre-Covid-19 is associated with a reduction in daily on-farm labour supply during the lockdown, an increasing share of household members who earned an off-farm income pre-Covid-19 is related to an increase in average daily family labour supply on the farm, possibly to compensate for forgone off-farm income. This essay highlights the importance of agriculture as a safety net for farm households and the need to ensure the functioning of agricultural value chains in times of major health crises in the future. The third essay examines the period after the end of the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown starting in June 2020. This period marked the first wave of Covid-19 infections in India, which was particularly prevalent in urban areas. Using data from the pre-Covid-19 baseline survey in February and March 2020, and data from a phone survey administered between December 2020 and early March 2021, we examine changes in farm input use among 257 farm households. We ask how farming activities (i.e. labour supply, input use, sustainable agricultural practices, crop marketing) were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic during the 2020 post-lockdown period. We measure exposure to Covid-19 using sub-district and village-level data on the number of Covid-19 infections. Using household survey data, we measure Covid-19 perceptions of the households’ primary caregiver. Results of fixed effects panel models within a difference-in-difference framework suggest that higher Covid-19 exposure increases farmers’ use of sustainable agricultural practices but reduces the share of crops for which they used external inputs. However, higher concern about a Covid-19 infection increases the share of crops for which farmers use intensification practices, while it reduces the likelihood of hiring labour. Farmers’ heterogenous responses might be explained by Covid-19 containment measures, labour scarcity, prevailing household-level uncertainty about the future development of the pandemic and the practicing of social distancing. The fourth essay is a work in progress that investigates interlinkages between urbanisation, socio-economic characteristics of farm households, agricultural management practices, biodiversity and crop yields. Our analysis is based on a case study on Lablab purpureus, a grain legume that is an important crop for farmers in the study area for subsistence as well as marketing purposes. We use plot- and household-level socio-economic data and plot-level biodiversity data collected from 101 Lablab growing farmers between December 2021 and April 2022. We measure urbanisation as the proportion of grey area cover in different radii around the Lablab plot based on satellite data. Results of a yield function suggest that pollinator richness, return of crop residues to the soil and higher quantities of chemical fertiliser are positively related to Lablab yields. Moreover, we find that high amounts of chemical fertiliser are related negatively to pollinator richness, while farmers’ adoption of crop residue return is negatively related to increases in grey area. Urbanisation directly negatively affects the abundance of ground-dwelling arthropods but it is positively associated with bee species richness. Our results suggest trade-offs between crop-livestock farming might prevent the adoption of crop residue return in more urbanised areas that could contribute to increasing yields while preserving biodiversity. Overall, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of the potential for sustainable intensification by farmers in urbanising areas. There are three main findings. First, urbanisation largely has negative implications for the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and there is a need for better incentives for farmers to adopt such practices in peri-urban areas. Re-focusing institutional support like extension services, enhancing information provision and facilitating market linkages could contribute to achieving this transition. Against the background of increasing weather variability and climate change, it is important that farmers are (made) aware of methods to adapt to these changing conditions. Second, overall, sustainable agricultural practices appear to have the potential to provide a win-win solution to protect both ecosystems and yields in peri-urban areas. However, the relationship between urbanisation, farm management decisions, biodiversity and yields still needs to be better understood to devise concrete policy recommendations. Finally, agriculture can provide an informal safety net to peri-urban farm households in times of health shocks. While sustainable agricultural practices could contribute to enhancing farm households’ resilience to agricultural supply chain disruptions, policies should seek to minimise disruptive effects on agricultural and labour markets during future health crises.

2024-05-23