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The agricultural sector in any country plays an important contributor to national output along with its high absorbability of the working population. In the agricultural sector, paddy production holds a major share in the total output in countries like India. The growth and stability of the paddy production at the national level depends on the same factors at the sub-national levels such as the provincial and district levels. The present study focuses first on the stability analysis of the quantity of food production and irrigation facilities in the top 10 rice-producing states in India and then on the stability of yield rates in three varieties of paddy production, Aus, Aman, and Boro, and irrigation facilities across the blocks in the Paschim Medinipur district of West Bengal, as a special reference. The analyses involves the evaluation of the growth and stability using Coppock’s method and trend analysis. It is found that Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh have a positive significant correlation between irrigation facilities and paddy production. From this study, it is also found that the correlation between changes in the yield rate of Aus, Aman, and Boro production and changes in irrigation is positive and significantly related to each other for Garbeta 1, Garbeta 3, Keshiary, Kharagpur 2, Chandrakona 1, and Chandrakona 2 blocks in Paschim Medinipur district under West Bengal. Therefore, the results recommend that the government should focus on irrigation facilities in those areas where the benefits of irrigation facilities are fully realized.

With the rise in the global population size there has been a parallel increase in the food demand. The agricultural sector in most of the countries has now come up with the uses in the modern technologies resulting into high yield rates besides environmental damage. The new agricultural practices of today have thus both economic positivity and environmental negativity. The present book intends to investigate the growth of agricultural sector and its implications to national output and environmental sustainability. It covers up economic and environmental implications of the agricultural practices in the modern world across the nations and groups of nations. The summary output of the coverage of the entire book shows that modern agricultural practices have led to high growth of the agricultural sector but environment has lost its in situ feature leading to sustainability problems. The recommendations are offered in terms of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices which can mitigate the challenges of climate change.

From the history of economic development for all types of economies of the world, agriculture has been a major source of income growth, food security and development. It applies traditional as well as modern tools and technologies to maintain rising growth trends, although in some cases it makes the environment polluted. The developing countries of today, those who were suffering from poverty and food insecurity, have now been able to grow several crops and feed their growing population. Productivity has been rising in the sector with the support of institutional interventions, such as credit and financing facilities, crop insurance facilities, irrigation facilities, fertilizer provisions, among others, leading to more production with the same level of two traditional inputs such as labour and capital. The world has been facing, on the other hand, the fluctuations and instabilities in the trends of different types of agricultural productions and yield rates. The present book, with the background, aims to cover up studies on the poverty increase and food security aspects of agriculture in several countries and populations. The summary of the studies shows that there has been growth in agricultural production and productivities and in maintaining more food security in the covered countries with institutional support but with rising fluctuations. The governments of these countries are recommended to intervene and make appropriate institutional support in an equitable manner across their regions so that rising growth could be maintained in a steady path in the agricultural sector.

Food waste is a challenging and vital issue in the world today. Despite the fact that agricultural technological advancements have effectively improved food production, one-third of worldwide produced foods are being lost or wasted. The fact that large volumes of food are produced but not consumed by humans has serious environmental, social and economic consequences. However the issue of food waste has drawn attention in the last 10 years both in academic and social fields. Under the background, this study aims to examine whether the countries having high agriculture as well as per capita incomes are responsible for food waste or not. The study uses the data on food waste out of export and import channels across the world’s selected 20 countries having about 70 per cent contribution to food waste. Using the period 1971–2019, the study finds that food waste is associated with agriculture as well as per capita incomes of the developing and developed countries, positive for majorly developing countries and negative for majorly developed countries. The time series analysis involving food waste, per capita agriculture income and per capita income as the indicators, the study finds that there are long-run relations; among them across many countries implying countries having high incomes are responsible for food waste in most cases due to their food preference, although having good infrastructural facilities for preservation of foods.

Agriculture is one of the important sectors for the sustainable development of any country. In order to achieve the SDG1 and 2, improvization of productivity and performance in agricultural development is needed. The present study attempts to analyse the change in productivity and cropping pattern among the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) countries that comprises Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The study also examines the performance of BIMSTEC countries in exporting the agricultural products. The study is based on the secondary data collected from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In accordance with the importance for the development of the country, the study also analyses the export and import of these cereal crops among the BIMSTEC countries. For the empirical investigations the study uses co-efficient of variation, Coppock’s instability index and Balassa’s index. The study reveals that productivity and cropping pattern of the cereal production has been changing gradually over time in all BIMSTEC countries which show the importance of products substitution. It also reveals that the development cooperation among the BIMSTEC countries through promotion of exports and imports is required to meet their needs.

In India, more than 21.9% of the total population is below the poverty line, which compelled the government to initiate several policies for alleviating poverty and food insecurity. It can be argued that often non-poor households may become food insecure due to their irrational expenditure behaviour. The widespread consumerism and commercialism in rural India as a result of globalization often drive rural households to spend more on non-food items than food items. As a result, it is frequently observed that non-poor farmers excluded from the social security programs are highly malnourished as a result of food insecurity, which pushes them back into the poverty trap. This study reviews critically the methodologies applied to measure household poverty and food insecurity and examine the relationship between the two using primary data collected from two villages of the Balasore district of Odisha whose major livelihood relies on agriculture using the m-logit model for data analysis. Results show even households living above the poverty line suffer from the problem of food insecurity. About 20.5% of the non-poor are food insecure in the study villages. The study also finds a location-specific spatial autocorrelation of Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and headcount ratio among the districts of the state using Moran's I. Hence, there is a need for properly targeted policy interventions and to revise the methodologies applied to measure household poverty and identify beneficiaries so that non-poor households are not deprived of food security programmes.

Food security is the major issue of the world as well as in developing countries like India in recent times. The study examines the status of food security for 15 selected states in India during 1995–1996 to 2018–2019 where the statuses of food security for the states are estimated by applying the multidimensional food security index. The secondary data on different food security indicators are collected from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agricultural Organization, National Family Health Survey (NFHS) report, RBI bulletin, Economic and Political Weekly Research Foundation (EPWRF), and different issues of Statistical Abstract of India. The value of the food security index has significantly increased over the study period. The food security conditions for all the states have improved at higher rates in the second subperiod compared to the first subperiod in the country. It has also used panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method for the estimation of log-term and short-term relationship between food security and socioeconomic indicators of various states in the country. The food security of most of the states could be improved with the improvement in the conditions on the per capita power consumption, workforce participation rate, and cropping intensity in the country. Furthermore, the regional imbalance has decreased establishing that food security of the poorer states improved at a higher rate compared to richer states.

The study aims to investigate the evolving dynamics of India’s agricultural sector, particularly the shift from reliance on informal money lenders to a more prominent role of institutional credit in recent decades. This transition is seen as empowering farmers with increased access to funds for crucial investments in areas such as better seeds, fertilizers, irrigation systems and mechanization. Employing the Vector Autoregressive methodology on secondary data sources spanning from 1990 to 2022, the researchers seek to explore the impact of institutional credit on the agricultural sector. To address this, researchers used direct institutional credit and the share of gross value added of agriculture and allied sectors at current prices, finding that neither of them causes the other. Further analysis concludes that in the future, the contribution of credit will have some impact on development. Recognizing the significance of agriculture as the backbone of many economies, the study emphasizes the potential contributions of enhancing this sector through improved practices, advanced technologies and enhanced rural infrastructure. Ultimately, such developments are expected to drive increased productivity and overall output in the agricultural landscape, making a substantial contribution to economic growth.