Promoting Sustainable Agriculture: Experiences from India and Canada

Agriculture growth, driven by Green Revolution, has increased the foodgrains supply, ensuring food security. The next stage, however, faces a serious challenge in terms of sustainability. While developing countries face the problem of sustainability of resource use, the challenge for developed economies is overuse of chemical inputs. These problems have increased awareness about sustainable farming and emphasised the need for moving towards it. Policies have since stressed promoting sustainable agriculture. Organic farming is a variant that is receiving special thrust under these policies. This paper examines the policy initiatives and experiences of promoting organic farming in India and Canada. In fact, the policy initiatives, if any, have emanated mainly form the viewpoint of trade concerns. There are very few studies that have gone into examining the issues of economic viability, institutional support, and market access for organic farming in India and Canada. This paper tries to fill this critical gap by examining these issues in a comparative framework. The analysis, mainly exploratory in nature, is based on the existing literature.