Financing Sustainable Agriculture in India

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-255-2_18How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Sustainable Agriculture; Sustainable Finance; Climate-resilient Agriculture; SDG

Abstract

Climate-resilient agriculture has mostly been financed by public funding ventures, which include state and central governments, and multilateral R&D finance institutions, through climate finance instruments such as grants, loans, and long-term equities. However, in the backdrop of a rapid pace of climate change and inadequate public resources for attracting private capital towards projects harping on sustainable agriculture, numerous alternate representations to entice private capital are being conceptualized. By bringing together time-tested instruments with risk mitigation options, we can strive to produce an attractive risk–return profile, which would subsequently boost the involvement of the private sector (“crowding in”).

As per the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals framework, SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) prioritizes sustainable agriculture. The clauses 2.3 and 2.4 of SDG 2 explicitly highlight productivity, resilience and sustainability. SDG 2.4 specifies marshalling investment towards resilient agriculture. Sustainable agriculture is also linked to other SDGs like reduction of poverty, climate change, water use, equality of gender, sustainable production, and consumption.

‘Sustainable development’ was initially coined by the Brundtland Commission as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Sustainable agriculture goes a step ahead and incorporates not only the environment but also the economic sustainability of agriculture producers and processes.

Ensuring the economic feasibility of small farming operations is an important issue in the larger scheme of things towards mainstreaming sustainable agriculture in developing countries like India. Being conscious of the prerequisite to prioritize sustainable finance, the Indian market regulator SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) has made available disclosure necessities for green bonds, using groupings like “Renewable and Sustainable Energy,” “Energy Efficiency and Green Buildings” and “Sustainable Land Use.” The Ministry of Finance has created a Sustainable Finance Task Force encompassing regulators and pertinent ministries which would work in tandem with expert groups on cataloguing climate risks to create classifications and an outline aimed at achieving results for Indian agriculture.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Partha Sarathy Adhya
AU  - Suresh Kumar Sahoo
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/06/13
TI  - Financing Sustainable Agriculture in India
BT  - Proceedings of the NDIEAS-2024 International Symposium on New Dimensions and Ideas in Environmental Anthropology-2024 (NDIEAS 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 212
EP  - 221
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-255-2_18
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-255-2_18
ID  - Adhya2024
ER  -