SUSTAINABLE ALTERNATIVE FARMING TECHNIQUES - AN INDIAN PERSPECTIVE.

Unlike the various socio economic and political issues, food security is the major daunting root challenge every country is to deal with. Food security problems accelerate with increasing population, overexploitation of natural resources, climate change, and resource degradation associated with rapid economic growth. Most of the third world countries are highly affected in terms of food dependency and food production crisis. The absence of a sustainable farming methods and the reduced efficiency of the traditional methods are the main reasons to be blamed on. In India the traditional farming methods like subsistence farming, ley farming, shifting agriculture, crop rotation, intensive farming, mixed agriculture, dryland and rain fed farming, and terrace cultivation are widely followed. These chemical farming methods are not only eventually reducing the land fertility, but also posing greater threat to the environment. A closer attention to these problems is mandatory to avoid the imminent food dependency and insecurity. The greater threat posed by the growing population and the reduction in the arable land escalate the problems. In this context country like India has to look on other alternative farming techniques which can be parallel to the traditional methods at the initial stages and can take over the centre stage at later stages for intelligently handling the intricate agricultural production challenges. In this review article, various alternative farming methods which India can successfully adopt for sustainable food production are discussed. The suitability and the potential drawbacks of each methods are also been analysed to have a better insight for careful selection of each methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]