Micro-level indicators for evaluation of environmental impact of agricultural technology

Abstract

The Green Revolution Technology was readily welcome in Indian agriculture because of its higher productivity and profitability. However, the short-term goal of higher yield had taken precedence over the relevant issues concerning long-term sustainability and the danger of environmental degradation leading to the destruction of the production system itself. The same technology is now being increasingly questioned for its role in rapid ecological degradation, depletion of non-renewable and semi-renewable resources, loss of biodiversity, and rendering agricultural development unsustainable. Despite the presence of several methods varying in quantitative rigour and objectivity to value environmental impacts in terms of costs and benefits, most of them involve sophisticated and complex computational procedures and are applicable at the micro level. In particular, simple methods or indicators for evaluating technology at the farm level are rather conspicuous by their absence. This paper, therefore, aims at developing first an approach and then a set of indicators that can, with simple time series micro-level data, evaluate and compare agricultural production technologies for their long-term sustainability.