NEWSLETTER July - December, 2008

Abstract

Rainfed Agriculture, Redefining Goals, Meet Emerging Challenges Despite impressive growth during the last four years, Indian agriculture continues to face major challenges posed by continue degradation of natural resources, rising production cost and declining profitability, climate change has now emerged as a new challenge threatening the food, water and environmental security. The impacts of climate change particularly the extreme weather events is already becoming evident in terms of increased inter-annual and inter-seasonal variability in rainfall and temperatures leading to fluctuation in availability of water resources and crop yields. Rainfed agriculture is more prone to weather extremes as crop production is entirely depend on monsoon rainfall. Agriculture in future is more likely to be affected by multiple abiotic stresses like droughts, floods, increased salinity and heat stress etc. simultaneously.