Alternative cereals can improve water use and nutrient supply in India

By Kyle Davis, Davide Chiarelli, Maria Rulli, Ashwini Chhatre, Brian Richter, Deepti Singh, Ruth DeFries
Science Advances | July 2018

DOI

doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao1108

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Citation

Davis, Kyle., Chiarelli, Davide., Rulli, Maria., Chhatre, Ashwini., Richter, Brian., Singh, Deepti., DeFries, Ruth. Alternative cereals can improve water use and nutrient supply in India Science Advances doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao1108.

Science Advances, 2018

Abstract

Humanity faces the grand challenge of feeding a growing, more affluent population in the coming decades whilereducing the environmental burden of agriculture. Approaches that integrate food security and environmental goalsoffer promise for achieving a more sustainable global food system, yet little work has been done to link potentialsolutions with agricultural policies. Taking the case of cereal production in India, we use a process-based crop watermodel and government data on food production and nutrient content to assess the implications of various crop-shifting scenarios on consumptive water demand and nutrient production. We find that historical growth in wheatproduction during the rabi (non-monsoon) season has been the main driver of the country’s increased consumptiveirrigation water demand and that rice is the least water-efficient cereal for the production of key nutrients, especiallyfor iron, zinc, and fiber. By replacing rice areas in each district with the alternative cereal (maize, finger millet, pearlmillet, or sorghum) with the lowest irrigation (blue) water footprint (WFP), we show that it is possible to reduce irri-gation water demand by 33% and improve the production of protein (+1%), iron (+27%), and zinc (+13%) with only amodest reduction in calories. Replacing rice areas with the lowest total (rainfall + irrigation) WFP alternative cereal orthe cereal with the highest nutritional yield (metric tons of protein per hectare or kilograms of iron per hectare) yieldedsimilar benefits. By adopting a similar multidimensional framework, India and other nations can identify food securitysolutions that can achieve multiple sustainability goals simultaneously.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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