India is particularly screwed in agriculture.
Either we’re going to innovate or starve to death.
Innovation is the only way to maintain Indian food security.
With this, Mark Kahn from the venture capital firm Omnivore Partners caught my attention as he gave a presentation at the Chicago Council on Global Affair’s annual global food security conference, Advancing Global Food Security in the Face of Weather Volatility and Climate Change. Kahn laid out a strong case why India is a perfect storm for driving agricultural advances for small farmers around the globe.
Kahn discussed three drivers for India’s agricultural technology startup revolution:
- Demand Growing: With increasing wealth, India’s diet is changing — more fruits, vegetables, and meats. This trend will continue in India and throughout Asia.
- Supply Constraints: India’s agricultural supply is tight and will worsen under business as usual. There are “multiple bottlenecks” limiting food production.
- Land is disappearing (urbanization) and degrading.
- Water quality and supply is worsening.
- Labor costs are skyrocketing.
- Ecosystem is right:
- Human capital of IT, biotech, pharma, etc; technical & managerial talent base.
- Research capital with many universities and research institutions with relevant people and programs.
- Business base and examples as India has a strong domestic agribusiness built up supporting small Indian farmers and
Moving past this, Kahn explained why he sees India as the best laboratory for small-scale agriculture:
- The Indian sub-continent has every single agricultural climate zone found around the world.
- Indian farming is small — there are not the large farms that dominate Iowa, Russia, and Australia.
- India’s challenges are the global small-holder challenges: limited capital (frugal and durable engineering), small-scale mechanization and lean information technology.
- The Indian market is large, big enough to sustain development of new technologies and innovative approaches to then export around the world.
These coalesce to make India unique. Unlike India, for example, China has not built up a branded agricultural export industry and, as Kahn put it gently in an interview, “Chinese internal agriculture is shit.” Other small-holder dominated nations do not have India’s human-capital base. Thus, for true innovation in small-scale farming technology, we should look to and invest in India.
Kahn provided these six key characteristics for Ag 3.0 at play in India and with relevance globa
lly for small-scale farming:
- Precision Agriculture
- Information Services
- Mechanization & Automation
- Sustainable Inputs
- Supply chain modernization:
- Innovative food products:
Kahn’s presentation simply made sense — it clicked as a logical way to look at the situation, opening my (and others’) eyes as to how to look at a path forward for agriculture in the 21st century.
And, amid valid and serious reasons for concerns over mounting climate chaos, Kahn laid a plausible case to see why, rather than starve, India will innovate to take a leading position in creating the Agriculture 3.0 revolution.
Photo credit: Praveen Sridhard and CIGAR Climate.