Green Technologies for Sustainable Agriculture: Policy Options Towards Farmer Adoption

Bio-fertilisers (BF) and bio-control agents (BCA) are the biotechnological interventions tried to improve crop production and protection for sustainable agricultural development. This paper based on a study, conducted in the state of Kerala, depending both on primary and secondary data, analyses the consumption pattern and farmer responses to the technology and cases thereof. A total of 840 farmers were surveyed using a structured, pretested questionnaire. Later on, the crop-wise use was estimated through a post stratification of the data. Logit analysis was done to study the adoption behaviour of the respondents. In Kerala, BF/BCA is produced by the public sector, private sector and NGO, and is distributed either directly to the farmers or indirectly through the retail shops. A sizeable part of production is sold to the Department of Agriculture itself as part of department schemes where the BF/BCA is given at subsidy. The analysis on the level of adoption of BF/BCA showed that the percentage of adoption is more in the case of BCA when compared to BF. The adoption of BF was found to be less than 1 per cent and for BCA it was around 11 per cent. The logistic regression analysis to study the adoption behaviour of the respondents (rice farmers) showed that educational level, farming experience, returns from farming and extension of technical support received by the farmers are the major factors that influenced the decision making with regard to the adoption of bioagents. Though subsidies facilitate the economic access to the technology, it did not ensure the sustained adoption and scientifically proper application. The analysis supports the statistically significant influence of technical support in the adoption of the technology, which underlines the importance of infrastructural and technological support mechanism in the wider adoption of the technology. Thus subsidies can be considered as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the sustained technology adoption.