New chickpea varieties adapted to warmer, short-season environments are bringing increasing prosperity to southern India and offer hope for farmers elsewhere in the semi-arid tropics.
Duttala Narayana Reddy, a chickpea farmer and head of a household of 10, is a contented man. Along with his neighbors in Kurnool district, Andhra Pradesh, southern India, he is reaping the benefits of the chickpea revolution that brought significant improvements to the living standards of farmers in nearly 100 villages of the district.
To appreciate the chickpea revolution in southern India, we need to go back a few decades. Northern India, with its long winters, has the better climate for chickpea cultivation but expansion of irrigation and high-input agriculture led to chickpea being largely replaced by wheat and other cash crops. During the 1964/65 cropping season, chickpea was planted on 5.14 million hectares in northern India; it is now planted on only 0.73 million hectares.
Chickpea is the most-widely-produced and -consumed pulse crop in India, accounting for 40% of India’s pulse production. But even this is not enough to meet domestic demand. To address the increasing shortfall in chickpea production, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), in partnership with Indian national systems, developed high-yielding, short-duration chickpea varieties that were resistant to fusarium wilt – characteristics needed to adapt the crop to the short season and warmth of southern India.
These chickpea varieties have been rapidly adopted, particularly in Andhra Pradesh. During the past 10 years, the chickpea area increased sixfold and production increased from 95,000 tons to 884,000 tons per year. Across the whole of southern and central India, the chickpea area more than doubled, from 2.05 million hectares in 1964/65 to 5.56 million hectares in 2008/09. Andhra Pradesh, once considered an unfavorable state for chickpea cultivation, has today the highest chickpea yields (averaging 1.4 tons per hectare) in India, and produces almost as much chickpea as Australia, Canada, Mexico, and Myanmar put together.
Before this chickpea revolution, Duttala Narayana Reddy and his neighbors used to cultivate sorghum, earning just enough to meet their basic necessities. Since switching to chickpea their incomes have increased from US$50–100 per hectare to US$500 per hectare. New varieties, such as “JG11″ and “Vihar”, perform well even in years of drought and heavy rain, suffering much smaller losses than the old varieties.
Chickpea replaced traditional main-season crops such as sorghum, cotton, chilies, and tobacco in Andhra Pradesh. Since chickpea is planted only at the end of the rains, farmers have extra time on their hands and are taking up dairy farming, earning an extra US$2,000–2,500 per year. These farmers have acquired tractors and threshers, television sets and motorbikes. They now live in brick houses rather than huts and mud dwellings. Narayana Reddy is educating his grandchildren in a residential school (a practice not common among the farming community), and some farmers are actually saving about US$4,500 a year.
This success story is proof positive that adoption of technologies can enhance production of chickpea in other regions of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where yield levels remain low.
This post is part of our series celebrating “40 years of CGIAR”
Photo credit: ICRISAT