Meet the FABLE India team

The team is led by the Centre for Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA). IIMA has been a research-focused organisation with individual members and research centres contributing to its progress. As a leading management institution, IIMA has close connections with industry and policy makers in India and abroad.

Their main areas of interest have been pathways for sustainable food and land use system, the food-energy-water nexus and its interlinkages with biofuel policies, closing the yield gap to achieve India's future food demand along with environment sustainability, water issues, healthy and sustainable diets, increasing land-use efficiency, protecting the forest land while keeping agricultural production levels, increasing the sustainability of the livestock production system.

Models used by the team: MAgPIE and the FABLE Calculator.

Former member: Satyam Saxena.

Transforming food and land-use systems in India

India is home to nearly 17.5% of the world's population, 15% of its livestock, and 8% of its biodiversity, yet it has only 2.4% of the world's land. Nevertheless, India is one of the largest producers of rice, wheat, sugarcane, pulses, groundnut, milk, cotton, and fruits and vegetables, with the highest net cropped area globally. Agriculture contributes nearly 17.8% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), and nearly two-thirds of the population is dependent on it. The agriculture sector engages nearly 54.6% of the country's workforce, supporting nearly 86% of small and marginal farmers, of whom nearly 14% are women.

Despite India's food self-sufficiency and high economic growth, the country still faces numerous food system challenges. Although India's agriculture sector has been performing well for the past two decades, the country still has a high prevalence of underweight, micronutrient-deficient, and obese populations. Current Indian diets are largely cereal-based and deficient in nearly 11 of the 25 essential nutrients. The AFOLU sector contributed nearly 171 Mt of CO2 equivalent emissions, which is nearly 6% of India's economy-wide emissions in 2018.

The production activities that are centered around cereal crops have led to regional bias and resource-intensive production systems that pose serious sustainability challenges. India is the world's largest consumer of groundwater, and up to 70% of agricultural production depends on it. A less diversified food production system further complicates the agriculture system's resilience under changing climate conditions. With a rainfall-dependent agriculture system, climate change is expected to make India's monsoon more erratic, creating risks to food and nutrition security, livelihoods, and the well-being of the population.

The primary challenges facing India include transforming food systems to ensure high farm incomes, especially for small and marginal farmers, advancing equitable livelihoods for all, diversifying crop production, repurposing agriculture subsidies and pricing policies towards nutrition-rich crops, and strengthening the agriculture value chain to reduce food loss and waste.

Key national objectives and targets

COP26- Carbon Neutrality/Net Zero Targets:

• Reduction of total projected carbon emissions by one billion tonnes up to 2030.
• Reduction of the carbon intensity of the economy by 45 per cent by 2030, over 2005 levels.
• Achieving the target of net zero emissions by 2070.

Afforestation Targets:

• India committed in 2015 to creating additional carbon sinks that can hold 2.5-3 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent (metric used to compare emissions from other greenhouse gases to CO2) by 2030.
• India joined the Bonn Challenge in 2015 with a pledge to restore 21 million hectare of degraded and deforested land. The target was raised to 26 mha by 2030 during the United Nations Convention on Combating Desertification Conference held in Delhi in September 2019.

Policy engagement

The team has engaged with a wide range of stakeholders to inform discussions and decisions around sustainable food and land-use systems in India. These actors include:

• International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
• International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
• International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)
• Forest Research Institute of India (FRI)
• National Innovation on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA)
• The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)
• World Resources Institute (WRI)
• Government of Gujarat
• Government of Odisha
• Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare (Government of India)
• Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF&CC)
• National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD)

Publications

• Jha, C.K., Ghosh, R.K., Saxena, S. et al. Pathway to achieve a sustainable food and land-use transition in India. Sustain Sci 18, 457–468 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01193-0.
• Chandan Kumar Jha et al 2022 Environ. Res. Lett. 17 074022. DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ac788a.
• FABLE India (2021). Policy Brief: Sustainable Food Transformations. Centre for Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA).

• FABLE (2020). Pathways to Sustainable Land-Use and Food Systems. 2020 Report of the FABLE Consortium. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), Laxenburg and Paris. 10.22022/ESM/12-2020.16896.. India chapter.
• FABLE (2019). Pathways to Sustainable Land-Use and Food Systems. 2019 Report of the FABLE Consortium. Laxenburg and Paris: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). Pathway for India.

Recent Activities

• Webinar: The role of food and land use systems in achieving India's sustainability target.


• Webinar: UN Food System Summit 2021 Science Days. 'Learnings from Country-Level Pathways to the Global Food Policy Debate'..