Eliminating Water Poverty — In conversation with Professor Dr Rattan Lal, World Food Prize Winner 2020 — Part 1

Dr Rattan Lal is a distinguished university professor of Soil Science at Ohio State University, Ex-President of International Union of Soil Sciences a global body of 60 000 scientists with headquarters in Vienna, Austria and he’s also the Ex-President of Soil Science Society of the United States in Madison, Wisconsin. Dr Lal is also the Director of Carbon Management and Sequestration Center. Last year in the presence of the Emperor and Empress of Japan, he received the Japan Prize in the field of “Biological Production, Ecology.” This year to top it all off, he’s the recipient of the World Food Prize for his lifelong research on the soil.

We had the honour of hosting Dr Rattan Lal on episode 6 of #EliminatingWaterPoverty Live Series. Dr Lal was in conversation with Mr Mohan Trikha, Chairman, OVBI Water and Founding Manager, OppLane. What follows is part 1 of the transcript of the whole video. Note: The transcript has been edited to limit the words and focus on the essentials.

Mohan T. - Can you walk our audience through, what are the critical aspects of healthy soil?

Dr Lal - With regards to soil, I developed what we call the soil centric approach, which is that even the improved varieties of corn and wheat and soybean and rice, for them to produce to their maximum potential, the soil and the environment in which they are grown must be ideal. It must be the best condition.

Mohan T. - Can you talk about the role of healthy soil in helping reduce the impact of global warming? We are all witness to the recent situations of fires. Recently, in California, with so much smoke around, we saw daytime turn into a night time. In India, in some regions, the water levels have gone down to 500 feet — 600 feet. Do you have any thoughts of how soil or healthy soil can help partially mitigate this?

Dr Lal — Yes, the answer is yes. First of all, let me mention, drought and flood are the two sides of the same coin. It is mismanagement of land and soil resources. It is this mismanagement that causes flood when it rains, and soil cannot absorb the water. And it is also this mismanagement when drought happens because soil did not have enough water. It all got washed away. The soil has been a major source of gaseous emission from the beginning of agriculture. The soil has been a source of carbon and they can be a sink as well if we can reverse the management trend and create a positive carbon budget. The scientific knowledge of how to create a positive carbon budget exists; translating into action is what is needed. I am very optimist that with better management, governance and change in policy, the science can be translated into action that will lead to mitigation of climate change

Mohan T. — India is right now extracting more water out of the ground than China and the United States combined. What do you think we should do to address this pending disaster?

Dr Lal — Your question of overuse of water is very correct. Flood irrigation which is developed several thousand years ago is still widely used in India and flood irrigation in an arid dry climate such as northwestern India is really not appropriate. We should change that to drip irrigation, micro-irrigation system and those technologies are developed.

I want to make two quick points.

One, there are 4 types of water:

1. One is called blue water; that’s rainwater, river water, groundwater, ocean river streams and so forth. That’s called blue water.
2. Then there is green water, and green water is what is held in the soil and what the plant absorbs. The green water is on which all life depends.
3. Then there is greywater, which is humanly contaminated and black water which is contaminated by human faeces.
4. Then the fourth type of water is the virtual water that is contained in the produce, for example, wheat, rice, corn, beef, they all have water requirement to produce it.

Management of these different components of water is required in such a way that we can decrease blue water and recycle black and greywater to increase green water supply is the major strategy for improving water resources.

Now the last point I want to mention is that in addition to the green water part is drought. There are five types of drought.

1. Meteorological drought when the long-term rainfall decreases and river flow decreases.
2. Climatological drought when the weather-related events cause a decrease in water availability.
3. Pedological drought when the soil degradation decreases the water holding capacity of the soil.
4. Agronomical drought when at the critical stages of plant growth, there is not enough water available for the reproductive capacity of the plants to produce the food we need to have.
5. Sociological drought and that is the misuse of the water where it should not be have been used, basically inappropriate use of water.

So the idea is to understand what drought is bothering a particular region. In most cases in India, it is the pedological soil and ergonomic drought which means the solution lies in the management of the rainwater where it falls and using proper science-based irrigation system; drip irrigation rather than flood irrigation. The problem can be solved through proper management.

Mohan T. — A couple of weeks ago we had the ambassador of Israel teaching us about the recycling of water and how they have a two-tier system for every household. How they have a greywater management system and how they can use it for irrigation purposes.

Dr Lal — Absolutely. I think Israel is a very good example. Here is a country in a desert area producing vegetable for entire Europe through better management of water. India has been blessed with water resources. There is no reason for poverty; we can alleviate it.

Mohan T. — You’re absolutely right. And that’s exactly what we at OVBI think, that this is a man-made crisis. That over time that we can help solve it.

So let me move to another issue of fertilization or fertilizers. How they are being used in farming and you have done this work for years. How does it feel that all those years that you were against the norm, much earlier than most people, about the fertilizer based farming and you have still maintained that it’s very inefficient? Somewhere I read that only 30 per cent fertilizer utilization happens and it is making the farmland really unproductive. Can you comment on what the farmers should do in India?

Dr Lal — First of all let me tell you if the soils are depleted and degraded and they are devoid of nutrients, fertilizers can help to supplement the nutrient supply. That’s exactly what happened in the 60s and 70s. Our food grain production in India was 50 million tons and we are right now 300 million tons. We have increased the rate of food production in India at a much higher rate than the population growth, and fertilizers did play an important role in that. So let’s not undermine it.

The point which is important to realize is the difference between poison and remedy is the dose. One aspirin can cure the headache, 100 aspirin can cause something else. Right now, India uses a lot of fertilizer, 165 kilogram per hectare. We should focus on increasing efficiency. We should focus on using better methods. We should focus on a better formulation of the fertilizer and the better application. Therefore the idea is to produce more from less, reduce the fertilizer, reduce the use of water but increase the efficiency of both fertilizer and water through improving soil health. Judicious use of fertilizer, supplemental dose after bio-fertilization, after recycling, after use of synthetic fertilizer only if and when needed, that is the strategy. If the soil is deficient in micronutrients, 17 of them essential for human health and our soils are depleted, they must be applied through chemical fertilizer but properly. So, please remember, it’s a supplemental dose and it is to be used as a remedy not as a poison and poison is what happens when it is used indiscriminately and imprudently and inappropriately. We must stop that through an equation.

Mohan T. — Very well said. Can you also comment on the crop burning in India because it is causing certain parts of India a huge amount of pollution? I mean Delhi is considered to be the worst polluted city in the world right now. What’s the solution to that?

Dr Lal - If I was Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Environment, I would make the following recommendations.

First of all, empower the farmers. Empower them, give them, the capacity to make a proper decision and once that capacity is given they must stop burning, they must stop using topsoil for brick making. They must stop broadcasting fertilizer in standing water. They must stop flood-based irrigation. They must stop excessive ploughing and they must stop infield burning of crop residues. The way to do that is not through the question, it is not through forcing anything.

It is through cooperation through education, through rewarding them, by giving them an incentive by increasing the payments for ecosystem services that we are demanding from farmers. We are asking them to mitigate climate change. We are asking them to mitigate flood. We are asking them to mitigate drought. We are asking them for improving the air quality. We must be prepared to pay the price and that is what the prudent governance means; empowering farmers especially the resource performers. They are the best steward of the natural resources and we must never ever forget that we must give them the respectability that they deserve.

That is called governance and I think our government is very prudent. I think they will come to the right decision and the possibility that rather than subsidizing flood irrigation, let’s subsidize better scientific agriculture.

Part 2 of the conversation will follow soon. If you’re eager to know the rest of the conversation, you can also watch the whole episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDF_eEgS6IY

Originally published at https://www.eliminatingwaterpoverty.org.