Asia
Chickpea: The Guaranteed Crop
The story begins in the early 1990s when the cotton crop failed repeatedly in many districts of Andhra Pradesh (AP). Reports began flowing in of desperate, debt-ridden farmers driven to suicide. Chilli and tobacco – the other two major cash crops – were also plagued by heavy pest damage, rising fertilizer and pesticide prices, and falling prices of these crops. Farmers began to urgently seek alternatives.
It was then that some interested farmers with
the help of A Satyanaryana, the then Senior Pulses Breeder at the Andhra Pradesh
Agricultural University’s Regional Agricultural Research Station, Lam, in Guntur,
conducted pilot demonstrations in Gottipadu of the 
ICRISAT kabuli type chickpea variety
ICCV2 (released by the Government of India as
Swetha), and the ICRISAT desi-type variety ICCC 37 (released as Kranthi).
During the demonstrations, farmers harvested up to 2 t ha-1 of chickpea and became instant
leaders. In the following years the area planted to this crop increased to over 1000 ha in
Gottipadu village alone. Most of the produce was sold as seed to the neighboring villages.
This farmer-to-farmer exchange increased the area under chickpea rapidly – by 1998,
the area under chickpea in AP had more than doubled to 146 000 ha; and total chickpea
production in the state during the same period increased nearly nine-fold (15 000
to 130 000 t), according to ICRISAT chickpea breeder Jagdish Kumar.
Following the Gottipadu example, many farmers
adopted two new cropping patterns, soybean-chickpea and sesame-chickpea to replace cotton
cultivation. Adopting chickpea helped farmers reduce costs of their purchased inputs such
as fertilizers, pesticides, and labor – chickpea requires just 100 kg DAP (diammonium
phosphate) per hectare as opposed to fertilizer-hungry cotton and chilli (the latter
sometimes gets over a ton of fertilizer per hectare!). Farmers also increased their
incomes as chickpea prices have been relatively high and stable. Further, the high-protein
(20-21%) chickpea grain improved nutrition and helped diversify the diet of these farm
families.
Moreover, extending kabuli cultivation to the tropics meant that the premium price obtained by farmers in the subtropics is also now available to these farmers.
No wonder G Koteswara Rao and his fellow farmers of Gottipadu village declare that “Chickpea has come to us as a real boon”. “With cotton cultivation becoming a gamble, chickpea has come in as a savior. It is a guaranteed crop!”
