A farmer plows a rice field in the southern India state of Kerala.

Drylands, which exist in over one hundred countries, occupy one-fourth of all land area on the planet. Degradation and desertification of these drylands threaten the livelihoods of nearly one-sixth of the world’s population. Continued neglect of these fragile drylands will jeopardize the populations dependent on these areas. The degradation must be a cause for concern across the world.

In India, the problem of land degradation is particularly acute. It is not just a physical processj, it is equally a product of neglectful and misguided politics. Until we alter the political processes which have exacerbated land degradation, physical efforts to halt the process will be futile. But it is important to understand that while the livelihoods of some are destroyed by land degradation, the livelihoods of others depend on the processes that degrade land.

Around one-third of India’s geographical area is affected by various forms of land degradation. Estimates of the total area of degraded land range from 75.5 to 107.43 million hectares, most of which is located in the semi-arid and arid areas of the country that are at the mercy of seasonal rainfall. In the arid and semi-arid regions, land degradation is often the result of failures in the development process. However, in areas well endowed with irrigation and other infrastructure, exploitation of soil nutrients is the major culprit. The net negative nutrient balance in these areas is about 8 to 10 million tons with an estimated annual loss of 5.8 million tons. Large chunks of land have become saline and water logged because of irrigation projects. Development induced land degradation is a major threat to the sustainability of the natural resource base of Indian agriculture.

Degradation of India’s drylands is the result of systemic neglect of the needs of these lands and of the livelihoods of the lands’ inhabitants. Agriculture development policy in the country is entrenched in the ‘Green Revolution’ paradigm, which has several defining features: partiality to wheat and rice strains that respond to intensive chemical fertilizers, substantial subsidies built into the chemical and industrial plants, a focus on intensive farming in irrigated areas, and research and price support networks designed to exclusively promote the growth of a few major irrigated crops. This paradigm does not recognize the investment needs of less naturally endowed areas and thus ignores the people who live on these less fertile lands. Irrigation infrastructure has been built on a massive scale to develop just a few pockets of prosperity that are characterized as the grain bowls of India.

Though national food security has improved over time, the practice of excessive concentration of public investments in a few select regions has resulted in the neglect of major tracts of the land in the arid, semi-arid, and sub-humid regions. Not coincidentally, these neglected regions have the greatest problems with poverty and local food insecurity. The availability of input subsidies, price support, and research support for rice and other irrigated crops has created an inordinate shift towards the farming of these crops. The public distribution systems created for price support for wheat and rice have also encouraged a shift away from low-water consuming millets to water-intensive rice production. This shift has in turn changed food consumption patterns, with less reliance on millets even in areas traditionally dependant on millets. The impacts of this shift are nutritional imbalances among local inhabitants and increased vulnerability to fluctuating rainfall.

Another result of these crop shifts is a growing clamor for groundwater extraction through bore-wells dug deep into the earth. Increased reliance on bore-wells has precipitated a crisis of increased farmer suicide because failed bore-wells mean lost investments and bankruptcy. Despite this trend, bore-well irrigation is growing much faster than surface irrigation.

Because of dwindling public investment, rain fed crops have lost their appeal. With rice available from public distribution systems, farmers in rain fed drylands have shifted their strategy to focus on large scale mono-cropping of cash crops. Traditional farming practices used to restore soil fertility—crop rotation, inter-cropping and growing leguminous pulses—are being abandoned. As farmers’ attention and investments are concentrated on irrigated lands, rain fed lands are neglected. Examples of such neglect are widespread. For instance, because farmers now apply meager amounts of manures to rain fed lands, rain fed soil does not have its nutrients replenished. Increasing labor wages, combined with increasing costs of cultivation and stagnant prices, have made many sustainable agriculture practices non-economical. As a result, practices such as green manuring have fallen into disuse.

Mono-cropping of rain fed lands has also increased pest infestation levels, which in turn has lead to higher usage of chemical pesticides. This, in turn, disturbs the natural predator-pest balance. As pests grow resistant to chemicals, investments on pesticides increase. Debts—often created by spending on pesticides—are only worsened by rainfall fluctuations and droughts.

Livestock trends also contribute to large-scale land degradation. Traditional livestock suffer the most when crop systems change, as livestock are highly dependent on crop residues for fodder. The appropriation of common grazing lands for cultivation, competing demands on labor, and increasing mechanization have reduced the livestock population. Public livestock support systems exist only for the intensive milk-based production systems and are not generally available for traditional cattle maintained in rain fed areas. Cattle, however, remain essential in rain fed areas to provide bullocks (progeny) and dung. Animal healthcare facilities are practically non-existent for livestock outside of the milk economy. Nutrient recycling has also become a major issue. The shift towards intensive dairying has created demand for the re-allocation of land and water for livestock. With reduced numbers of livestock in rain fed agriculture systems, the farm economy is becoming less diverse at thus increasingly prone to failure.

These trends, coupled with climate changes that have increased the vulnerability of rain fed areas, have created large scale indifference among farmers to rain fed farming. Farmers’ lack of interest in sustaining the quality of their lands, livestock, and biomass is a major cause of land degradation in rain fed areas. Public investment on these lands has been meager and has been focused only on soil and water conservation. Improving soil fertility is not a core goal of government investments in watershed development. In practice, plans to recover soil fertility have simply meant increased subsidies for purchasing and developing fertilizers.