ITC Scales Up Climate Smart Agriculture Initiative
On National Farmers’ Day or Kisan Diwas, multi business conglomerate ITC reaffirmed its commitment to scale up its interventions in the field of Climate Smart Agriculture with an aim to help Indian farmers withstand increasing weather-related uncertainties whilst boosting their incomes.
ITC’s Climate Smart Agriculture initiative has already covered 15 lakh acres of land across India benefitting over 4.5 lakh farmers. The multidimensional interventions focus on reducing vulnerability while increasing the resilience of farmers towards climate change.
According to experts, Indian farmers will be deeply impacted by extreme weather events in the days to come. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that with a temperature increase between 1-4 degrees Celsius in India, rice production could decrease by 10-30 per cent and maize by 25-70 per cent. With India set to become the most populated nation in the world by 2023, ensuring food security for the country’s 1.3 billion population will be also critical.
As a company committed to its credo of ‘Nation First, Sab Saath Badhein’, ITC has made sustainable development and climate action core pillars of its corporate strategy. Given the urgent need to build climate resilience in agriculture, ITC has embarked on a mission to make Indian villages climate smart by promoting practices that are weather smart, water smart, seed/breed smart, carbon/nutrient smart and institutional/market smart.
S Sivakumar, Group Head of Agri Business & Sustainability, ITC said, “Agriculture, which provides livelihoods to half of India’s population, is extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and the devastating effects of climate change like frequent and extreme weather events, depleting groundwater, top soil erosion etc. Recognizing these challenges, we have made identification of climate risks and building climate resilience across the value chain key components of our approach to de-risk farming and making it profitable. We are encouraged by the success of the Climate Smart Agriculture initiative and the benefits that it has yielded for farmers and accordingly plan to expand it further.”
