India committed to G20 agriculture pledges: Agri Minister

The Dollar Business Bureau

India is committed to an early implementation of G20 agricultural pledges, made at the G20 agriculture ministers’ meetings, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh said on Sunday.

Addressing the G-20 Agriculture Ministers’ Meeting in Berlin, Singh said India will continue to extend its support to early implementation of past commitments made at the earlier meetings, particularly in the fields of research and development, collaboration and knowledge transfer, action to combat food loss and waste, and information and communication technologies (ICT).

Singh further said that it was important for the G20 member countries and also the non-member countries to achieve the sustainable global food security goals, and that there was emerging needs to meet food and nutritional security challenges through innovative solutions and collaborative and coordinated polices.

“India also supports the proposal of strengthening of the agricultural market information system (AMIS), underscores the importance of assessment of stocks and suggests sharing of best practices in this regard,” an official statement quoted Singh as saying.

The agriculture minister also highlighted paramount decision taken by the Indian government to promote and ease communication process in the agriculture industry. Some of these include agricultural web portals, mobile apps and broadcasting channel. “With the objective to reform the agriculture marketing system in the country, a National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) portal has been launched which provides a pan-India electronic trading,” Singh said.

“In order to promote efficient irrigation practices in the country, a major irrigation programme was launched by the government in 2015 with emphasis on improving water-use efficiency through water conservation, rainwater harvesting and use of micro-irrigation. The programme aims at providing end-to-end solutions in irrigation supply chain, water sources, distribution network, farm level applications and extension services on new technologies and information,” Singh said.