THE PHILIPPINE Department of Agriculture (DA) has warned that there has been declining water supply for agriculture over the last few decades and the presence of the El Nino weather phenomenon could lead to an “agriculture crisis”.

India, a country with about 70 per cent of its people depending directly or indirectly on agriculture, is going through an agrarian crisis of unprecedented scale. Two back-to-back droughts, fast-depleting ground water, weather events such as heavy rainfall, floods, drought, low productivity of small-scale farming and declining rural wages clearly point to a deepening crisis.