Mumbai: What will it take to revitalise the agricultural sector? Identify new sources of growth while ensuring that the food security system works. This is the need of the day, feel strategists, at the Tata Economic Consultancy Services (TECS), especially if the new agricultural policy’s target of four percent growth is to be achieved.

They aver that new sources of growth are necessary as the reforms and liberalisation of the 1990s have virtually bypassed the Indian agricultural sector, according to TECS.

A TECS report titled ‘Revolutionising India’s agriculture: Towards a reform agenda, states that five new growth areas have been identified by strategists.

The report says that the key driver to exploit these areas is likely to be policy reform. "While the first revolution in Indian agriculture was driven by ‘technology’, the second one-that we need to usher in-has to be driven by reforms," says the report.

The first new area of growth should be sound pricing and distribution policies, says the report. This, it says, is needed to promote higher production and more efficient use of inputs like water, power and fertilisers.

The TECS report says the second area of growth is development of downstream activities like food processing and cold storage, as well as diversification into high-value niches.

The third area of growth is in corporate farming and horticulture, oilseeds and food grains. Private investment could drive food processing and biotech, while public investment could seed growth in untapped regions and continues the thrust in R&D.

"A major thrust on exports could be the fourth area of growth," the report feels. "The push for lowering of tariff barriers in the agriculture sector at the WTO level will improve the export potential of the agricultural sector."

The fifth area of development will be utilising untapped potential, especially in the eastern region.

Farmers will be the biggest beneficiaries of reform in agriculture, says the report. It emphasises on the importance of letting markets work, while building a focussed safety net for those below the poverty line.

The report has also advocated industrialisation of agriculture and professionalisation of agriculture management as a way to bring agriculture within the loop of industrial development.

The report argues for reforms like disbanding of the minimum support price scheme and freeing of the procurement price regime. Procurement prices will be market determined. This is the first leg of the reform structure.

The second led of the reform structure envisages privatising procurement and distribution, in other words, privatising the Food Corporation of India.

The report talks of privatising distribution and retailing at state levels with a commitment to below the poverty line (BPL) segments of the population as a pre-determined system of issue prices and BPL allocations.

The report calls for a national apex-level authority named the National Food Security Management Authority to be established for management of the food security system.