Restructuring the Indian agricultural system toward sustainability and lower environmental costs

The evolving international conflicts have a rippling effect on global food security, forcing nations to impose new trade laws to increase their domestic supply at reduced prices and promote the need to develop local and regional food systems to reduce transboundary dependence. While aiming to become a major global food supplier, India faces significant domestic food security risks. India has achieved food security through injudicious fertilizer application on the domestic front. Past agricultural policies, while primarily focusing on maximizing production, paid less attention to their environmental consequences. India feeds 17.1% of the world's population, with 10.7% of the world's arable land: this will further increase with increasing national and international food trade. Sustainably feeding the growing population has garnered considerable attention; however, its national implementation still needs to be improved. The current intensive agricultural practices operate at low water, nutrient, and nutritional efficiencies, demanding high input for high output. As a result, Nitrogen, Phosphorus losses are high, and groundwater resources are depleting in some areas. The vexing question is how to produce sufficient food in the existing regions with minimum inputs and reduced environmental impact. For this, India must reconfigure its current cereal crop production and interstate crop distribution system by reducing nutrient pollution losses, greenhouse gas emissions, and water consumption while sufficing its increasing nutritional demand. Using a state-of-the-art framework from agricultural sciences, network, and resource optimization, our study provided ways toward national assessment of Indian staple crop system redesign for future sustainable intensification.  Further, by incorporating interstate trade within this restructured system, we try to understand how India's cereal crop redistribution will impact domestic food security. Thus to limit the environmental burden of the growing consumer demand, we optimized crop distribution and domestic trade patterns within the parameters of minimizing nitrogen and phosphorus losses. This realistic multi-dimensional framework will help India and other nations identify sustainable food security solutions.