2016 Articles

Synergies and trade-offs for sustainable agriculture: Nutritional yields and climate-resilience for cereal crops in Central India

DeFries, Ruth; Mondal, Pinki; Singh, Deepti; Agrawal, Ishan; Fanzo, Jessica C.; Remans, Roseline; Wood, Stephen

Sustainable agriculture has multiple objectives, including efficient use of land to produce nutrients for human consumption, climate resilience, and income for farmers. We illustrate an approach to examine trade-offs and synergies among these objectives for monsoon cereal crops in central India. We estimate nutritional yields for protein, energy and iron and examine the sensitivity of yields to monsoon rainfall and temperature. Rice, the dominant crop in the region, is the least land efficient for providing iron and most sensitive to rainfall variability. Sorghum and maize provide high nutritional yields while small millet is most resilient to climate variability. Price incentives are strong for rice. No single crop is superior for all objectives in this region. Instead, understanding which crops, or combinations of crops, are most suitable requires identifying household-, community-, and region-specific priorities coupled with empirical analysis that considers multiple objectives.