ABSTRACT
The agriculture sector in Punjab has experienced tremendous growth since the era of the Green Revolution of the mid-1960s, which focused on wheat and rice crops. The rational use of fixed inputs in Punjab agriculture appears to be most important for sustaining long run profits of wheat and rice crops as well as for the agriculture sector as a whole. This chapter analyses the economic perspective of wheat and rice production in Punjab under stagnating productivity, increasing costs, changing domestic and global market conditions and the depletion soil–water resources regime. For increasing profitability, the focus would have to be on reducing the cost of production for paddy and wheat. The agricultural price policy since the 1960s has aimed at giving remunerative prices of wheat and paddy in the form of Minimum Support Prices, backed by their effective procurement. The international prices for wheat and rice have been falling since 1995–1996.
