Agricultural Risk Management

“Agriculture is a profession of hope”, someone said. Man has landed on moon and has sent unmanned spacecrafts to Mars and Venus and transforming lives by fascinating technological innovations, yet he cannot shower rains at will, cannot prevent droughts or floods or even predict them with certainty. Risk and uncertainty are considered ubiquitous and varied in agriculture resulting from a range of factors including the vagaries of weather, the unpredictable nature of biological processes, the pronounced seasonality of production and market cycles etc.

Weather forecasts are probabilities and projections based on improved technologies but not reachable to many small and marginal farmers. But still vast majority of the people in the country continue in farming with a hope that they would get better production and better prices. Agriculture continues to play a major role, in spite of declining share in India’s overall economy. Even today, as we entered the new millennium, the situation is still the same, with almost the entire economy being sustained by agriculture, which is the mainstay of the villages. Although agriculture contributes less than 15% of India’s GDP, its importance in the country’s’ economic, social and political fabric goes well beyond this indicator. The rural areas are still home to 75 percent of the India’s 1.2 billion people, a large number of whom are poor. Most of the rural poor depend on rain-fed agriculture and fragile forests for their livelihoods. Agricultural risk is associated with negative outcomes that stem from imperfectly predictable climatic and price variables. Weather and climate are major risks and uncertainty factors impacting agriculture production. Market risk is due accessibility of inputs, uncertainty of prices in buying inputs, selling farm output, dairy and livestock products etc.

Risk management is very critical to the success of agriculture, and yet there is a lack of tools used to manage risk as well as a lack of understanding of the tools themselves. Though, risk is an integral part of agriculture and farmers make risky decisions every day and confront different types of risk, changes in the risk environment and available tools to manage the risk make it a compelling reason to engage in risk management education.

This volume is outcome of selected papers presented at the National Seminar on “Agricultural Risk Management” organized during 3-4 January 2014 by Centre for Good Governance (CGG) in association with National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRD&PR)

The purpose of this comprehensive edited book of selected articles is to contribute to improved agricultural decision making by explaining what can be done in risk analysis and management. It should prove useful not only to practitioners and scientists involved in agriculture, water and land use, environmental management but also to policy makers in formulating appropriate strategies in agricultural risk management in India and elsewhere. Further, we hope that this volume will contribute to productive policy change to formulate sustainable risk mitigation strategies in agriculture leading to increased farm income

Devi Prasad Juvvadi Prof. Devi Prasad Juvvadi is Director, Agriculture Management at Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad with about three decades of experience in agricultural research, teaching and consultancy. After completing his B.Sc (Agric) at ANGRAU, he pursued Masters in Soil Science at American University of Beirut and advanced training in soil science at Oxford University, England. He worked as Assistant Professor at American University of Beirut for a decade and adjunct to US-Saudi Joint Commission on Economic Co-operation in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He worked as Consultant to various international organizations in Middle East, Africa and Europe. Prof.Devi Prasad worked as Team Leader for Agriculture Finance Corporation's project on A.P. Community Based Tank Management Project and Team Leader for External M&E of A.P.Well, a Netherlands supported project. For the last decade he is involved in various projects with Centre for Good Governance including change and service delivery projects in agriculture under a DFID supported programme. He has been trainer, resource person and consultant to many organizations including DMRL, DRDL, MIDHANI, NAARM, MANAGE, SAMETI, EEI, SBI, ITC, APWELL, AFC etc. Prof. Devi Prasad has published widely in international journals, published bulletins, review articles, contributed to English and Telugu news papers on agriculture and presented papers in various international conferences. Prof.Devi Prasad travelled widely in over 26 countries in all the continents.

Gangaiah Bollempalli Dr. Gangaiah Bollempalli is Additional Director General Centre for Good Governance. After completing his BA in Economics, he completed MA in Economics- Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, M. Phil; International Studies- School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Ph.D., Economics at Osmania University. Before joining CGG he was Economic and Statistical Adviser (Additional Secretary), Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India, New Delhi . In the Government worked in Planning Commission and other key central ministries of Agriculture, Rural Development, Urban Development and Small Scale Industries and exposed to working of macro and micro level programmes/project interventions. Also worked in Rural Development Ministry for four years handling support to micro-level interventions of economic and social empowerment, community mobilization in six major states of India Besides long experience in the Governmen, he has worked in International donor funded projects of DFID, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Global Fund on HIV, TB, and Malaria for about 7 years in health sector covering aspects of HIV/AID prevention, care social marketing and health advocacy. He was involved in consultancy studies for several international agencies like World Bank, UNIFEM, ILO, UNAIDS, DFID, NOVIB, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Deutsch Bank Asia Foundation, Humanist Association of Norway, Family Health International on wide ranging subjects including Health, HIV/AIDS, Gender, Irrigation, Livelihoods and Migration, Poverty and social reform. Dr.Gangaiah published several articles and research papers on agriculture, health, evaluation, ecological economics.

K. Suman Chandra Dr. K. Suman Chandra is Professor& Head, Centre for Agrarian Studies and Disaster Mitigation, National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayat Raj, Hyderabad. His areas of specialization include agrarian reforms in general and tenancy reforms in particular. A sociologist by training, he has extensive field work experience which served as the basis for training rural development functionaries over the last two decades. To his credit there are four books and several articles published in reputed journals.