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  • What are three options to increase food production? Discuss each giving the salient features, merits and demerits.

What are three options to increase food production? Discuss each giving the salient features, merits and demerits.

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Food production can be increased by the following methods:

(a) By introducing better crop varieties: This can be done by selective breeding of plants to include desirable characteristics in a particular plant.

Merits: Many new varieties of wheat, rice, maize, etc. had been introduced. This helped significantly improve wheat and rice production after the implementation of the Green Revolution in India. Per acre yield increased because of high-yielding and disease-resistant varieties of plants.

Demerits: Sometimes, selective breeding can produce some obnoxious weed which can be difficult to get rid of. Some mutations in plants can be highly harmful to the human population.

(b) by improving irrigation facilities: Water is especially important for plants and crops to need a lot of water to grow properly. For example, a rice plant needs so much water that it is kept submerged for most of the time during the cropping season.

Merits: Better irrigation facilities have helped in improving crop production in many states. Farmers in many states (like Punjab and Haryana) became rich because of better irrigation facilities.

Demerits: Intensive irrigation leads to overexploitation of water resources. In many places, the water table has gone down drastically because of intensive irrigation. This is creating a shortage of drinking water in many places. Constructing dams also adversely affects the environment.

(c) By using synthetic fertilizers: Plants take up many minerals from the soil. As a result, the soil is sapped up with most of the nutrients after a couple of farming cycles. Some method needs to be applied so that soil can replenish lost nutrients. Adding synthetic fertilizers is the fastest way of achieving this.

Merits: Synthetic fertilizers help in quickly replenishing soil nutrients.

Demerits: Synthetic fertilizers leave many harmful chemicals in the soil. This leads to groundwater pollution. This also leads to the accumulation of harmful substances in the human body because of bioaccumulation

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