“We live under the prostitution of the tropics, and we have to pay a heavy price for the minimum survival at all times”-Tagore

This article is from WeChat official account:Understand this planet (ID: PNXQ69) author: pork, Publisher: this god, title figure from: vision China

India and China are the two most populous countries in the world. China has a population of 1.4 billion and India has a population of 1.35 billion. If a country with a large population wants to solve the problem of food for the people, arable land is particularly important.

In the general impression, my country ranks third in the world in terms of land area, and India’s land area is only one-third that of my country. As everyone knows, the land of the Indian subcontinent is particularly fertile. Almost all the land can be used for farming. India has 160 million hectares of arable land and China has 120 million hectares of arable land. India actually has more arable land than China.

Although India has more than 40 million hectares of arable land than China, India’s annual grain output is only half of China’s. In 2017, China’s grain output was 617 million tons, and India’s was about 280 million tons. In other words, with almost the same population, Indians only produce half of our food every year.

▲The distribution map of cultivated land in the world. Although India’s land area is 1/3 of China, almost all of it can be used as cultivated land

Then why does India have more arable land than China, but the grain output is less than half of China’s?

1. India is short of food, in the final analysis, it’s still God’s not rewarding food

Many people have summed up several reasons for low-yield Indian agriculture: One is India’s industry is not good. We know that modern agriculture is fed back by industry. The sustained high yield of agriculture depends on the continuous investment of industry. For example, the production of various agricultural machinery, fertilizers and pesticides, and even the cultivation of high-yield grains. Compared with China in this regard, India is precisely its weakness.

The second reason is Water conservancy. China is a major infrastructure country. We have been building various irrigation systems since the founding of New China. However, agriculture in most areas of India basically depends on annual Monsoon rains.

The third reason is the Indian agricultural land ownership system. India has not carried out land reform, so there are still a large number of tenant farmers and hired farmers, which leads to their low labor enthusiasm and the government promotes agriculture. There were many obstacles during industrialization.

These reasons are partly true, but these are not the decisive factors, because in 1949, China’s grain output was already twice that of India. China is 113 million tons, and India is 62 million tons.

At that time, China’s industrial accumulation was also very weak. China had just ended the War of Resistance against Japan and the Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. At this time, India and Pakistan had been divided for two years, and our third land reform had not yet begun. In this case, China’s total grain output is still twice that of India.

Since then, China and India have each followed their own agricultural roads. India has experienced two so-called “green revolutions.” China has also regarded agriculture as an important task for a long time, and the annual No. 1 document is related to the three agricultural issues. But these two countries have gone so far along the way, and the ratio of each other’s agricultural output has not changed much. China’s grain output has always been twice that of India.

Of course, the above three factors inhibit the agricultural output of India, but these cannot lead to a gap of up to double the agricultural output of China and India.The food yield per unit area cannot even reach the world average per unit food yield. India’s rice yield is 2,191 kg/ha, and the world average is 3,026 kg/ha; wheat yield is 2,750 kg/ha, and the world’s average is 3289 kg/ha.

Actually, the biggest difference in agriculture between China and India, or the biggest reason for restricting India’s food production, is India’s drought. The climate of India is a typical tropical monsoon climate, and its classification is also very straightforward. There are two seasons throughout the year, the dry season and the rainy season. The rainy season in most parts of India is concentrated in June to September, and the rest of the time depends on the precipitation stock of these four months.

▲The famous Indian step wells were well dug in the history of Indian society in response to drought. In order to dig deeper, they had to import It’s getting bigger and bigger

If you look at the rainfall alone, India actually does not have a lot of rainfall. The average annual rainfall in the country is between 1,000 and 1,500 mm. You must know that the average annual rainfall in Shanghai is only 1,100 mm. However, India’s main economic region is the tropical region south of the Tropic of Cancer, with high temperatures throughout the year and very large evaporation. It is difficult for rainy season rainfall to survive.

2. How dry is India?

Friends who care about India may often see news about droughts in India. Perhaps India does not have droughts every year. Basically, it will happen once every two years, and it is generally a large-scale, large-scale or even nationwide drought. Because the drought in India basically means that the monsoon is late, or the precipitation brought by the monsoon is smaller than in previous years, the impact range is generally relatively large.

Last year, India suffered a large-scale drought.The drought in Tamil Nadu is extremely serious. The precipitation brought by the southwest monsoon has decreased by 29% compared with previous years. The four reservoirs in its capital, Chennai, gradually dried up, reducing their storage capacity to 1%.

▲Chennai citizens line up to wait for the water tanker to deliver water

The only thing that urban residents can rely on is to dig deeper and deeper groundwater. Two-thirds of Chennai’s water comes from groundwater. To alleviate the crisis, the Indian government uses trains to transport millions of liters of water from hundreds of kilometers away every day. Some people say why India does not build toilets? In fact, the very important reason may be the lack of water. Many communities in India use motorized wells to get water, and there is no condition to build a toilet for you.

▲When NASA’s satellite photographed Puzhal Lake in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, southern India in June 2019 (pictured on the right), This lake in Chennai has dried up

However, Chennai is by no means the only city in India that lacks water. Most cities in India are facing a water crisis. Not long ago, on June 22, 2020, Indian media reported that there was a water crisis in the water storage of seven lakes and dams in Mumbai, India’s largest city. The water storage capacity was reduced to 10% of the original. Can only continue to maintain 42 days of water supply, the fate of this city is counting on the monsoon to arrive on time.

This is still the case in the so-called India’s largest and fourth largest cities, so the impact of drought on Indian agriculture can be imagined. Two-thirds of India’s agricultural land relies on rainfall for irrigation. Once the southwest monsoon is abnormal, crops harvested in autumn will suffer a large reduction due to lack of moisture. The reduction in food production has led to an increase in social prices in India, so India’s inflation is often directly linked to whether the southwest monsoon can be as promised.

In addition, June and July are the planting seasons in India. The late rainy season will also result in a substantial reduction in the farming area of ​​Indian farmers, especially rice, which will directly affect the next harvest.

The University of California in the United States has done research on the suicide records in India for decades. They found that Indian agriculture is extremely sensitive to temperature. During the crop growing season, an average daily temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius will cause 67 suicides. In 2015, 12,602 farmers across India committed suicide due to drought.

India’s Minister of Agriculture, Radha Mohan Singh, once stated directly that India’s low food production cannot be simply attributed to the lack of advanced planting technology. The lack of large-scale rainfall and the short planting season are the reasons why the technology has improved but the potential yield has not been tapped.

▲India’s population density is very high, so in the absence of manufacturing to absorb a large number of people, continuing large-scale infrastructure construction can only produce more Slum

Three. To completely change the fate of drought, India needs a self-subversive transformation

At this point, some people may want to ask, if the drought has led to the restriction of agricultural output in India, then more water conservancy construction will be carried out, and more reservoirs and dams will be built to store rainwater in the rainy season to meet the drought. Isn’t it all right? That is to say, the water conservancy facilities are not enough.

This sentence may only be half right. Insufficient water conservancy is just a shallow contradiction. Water conservancy facilities can be slightly improved on the existing basis, or the current situation of water resources in a small area can be changed, but for a large area as a whole The ecological environment is powerless. Otherwise, with China’s infrastructure capacity, how can there be such a huge groundwater funnel area in North China?

▲Excessive extraction of groundwater causes groundwater funnel area

We assume that India wants to change the status quo of drought through water conservancy projects, then it needs to build many dams on the river, and build a large area of ​​reservoirs around it to store the intercepted water. Considering the amount of evaporation in India, the area of ​​the reservoir must be large enough, which requires a lot of land.

But this is very difficult for India. With the population of India from 390 million at the beginning of the founding of the nation to 1.35 billion now, a large number of natural lakes and swamps have been buried due to food production and urban expansion.

Take Chennai as an example. From 1980 to 2010, Chennai’s urban area expanded rapidly from 47 square kilometers to 402 square kilometers, while the wetland area dropped sharply from 186 square kilometers to 71.5 square kilometers. The existing lakes and swamps cannot be kept, how can you expect the government to spend countless financial resources and manpower to build countless new reservoirs and dams?

In the final analysis, India’s drought problem is essentially a contradiction between population and natural ecology. From the perspective of vegetation distribution, most of the South Asian subcontinent, especially South India, is actually a savanna vegetation area. Its natural vegetation is a tropical savanna landscape similar to Africa.

▲Distribution map of world vegetation belt

India’s total renewable inland freshwater resources are also only half of China’s. China is 2813, India is 1446(units are all billion cubic meters).India itself is in a relatively dry natural ecology. This kind of drought at the source is not a man-made result, it is formed naturally, and it has reached its limit for this arid land to carry 1.35 billion people. The quality of life of Indian civilians has been extremely compressed.

▲Indian farmers

For India, the real viable path is to find a way to reduce the population first, and to implement it seriously. Only when the population drops to a certain level can a certain amount of land remain To conserve lakes and build reservoirs. If the Indian population maintains its current state, the Indian government and even Indian society will have very limited room to change operations, and it can only be forced to fall into the predicament of involution.

If their population can be reduced and the water problem can be effectively alleviated, the grain output per unit area in India will soon rise, and it will be possible to use less land to feed more people and improve agricultural efficiency. India is very rich in sunlight and heat. Only when water resources are stable and sufficient can sunlight and heat be used by agriculture. If water resources are in short supply, sunlight and high temperature will be a trouble.

However, it is not easy for India to complete this task. It needs a strong government to eliminate all resistance. However, this is in line with everything that India is customary and proud of, such as Indian democracy, local power, and religion. Run in the opposite direction.

▲India’s upper class people are praying for rain

This article is from WeChat official account:understand this planet (ID: PNXQ69), of: pork, Publisher: The god