Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
both on fertility limitation and on related development aims. Immediate
reduction in fertility do not guarantee the population stabilization, it is
mostly depend on the age composition of the population. Population will
be stabilized in a condition when numbers of women leaving the repro-
ductive age group will equal to the numbers of women entering in the
reproductive age group. Until this condition is achieved, population have
tendency to increase which is called as 'population momentum'. Popula-
tion dynamic simply means the short-terms and long-terms changes in the
size and age structure of the population. It deals with the way population
is affected by birth and death rates and by immigration and emigration.
The linkage between population dynamic, food production and nutrition
security is complex to generalize [4, 5]. There is no steady relationship be-
tween population growth and food production [6]. There have been large
fluctuations in agricultural production. Though after mid 1980s, India
achieved self-sufficiency in food grain production but there is no surety
that grains in productivity would be sustained (Parikh, 2007). One concern
is that Indian agriculture is mostly affected by climatic or natural barriers
like drought, flood etc. And another concern is the environmental effects
of High Yield Variety (HYV) technology. Use of chemical pesticides and
fertilizers in agriculture may increase the yield capacity in short-term but
it has adverse affect on soil fertile which may reduce the yield per capita
in the future. Indian agriculture always remains as a subsistence type in
nature but not as a commercial. Roy and Pal (2002) [8] showed that public
investment in agriculture has declined considerably which might affect
adversely in agriculture. The concern might be true. Many of the authors
urged that agricultural growth rates in India are slowing down [9, 10, 11].
When growth rate of food grain production turns down, but population
is hardly declining, then sustainability of food grain availability is a big
question mark to us.
Though West Bengal is performing well in the food grain production
but major concern is in the future sustainability of the food grain produc-
tion. Because of the site advantage, being located on fertile Gangetic plain,
West Bengal remains most densely populated state in India. According to
2011 population census of India, West Bengal population reached to 91.3
million with an additional increase of 11 million population since last cen-
sus. With this large numbers of population it is very essential for the state
