Abstract

Punjab agriculture dominated by wheat-ricecropping cycle witnessed a quantum jump in agriculturalproduction and productivity as the result of green revolutiontechnology and contributed largely towards ensuring foodsecurity to India’s growing population. But overtime, growthand production of crops in the state is on decline due tooverexploitation of its natural resources. The state now faces theproblem pertaining to sustainability of its agriculture. Thepresent paper evaluates the extent of sustainability of cropproduction in Punjab. Sustainability has been measured usingtime trend analysis of Monteith (1990) and inferences ofsustainability were drawn from contingency table. Further,geometric growth rates of total area and yields of all majorcrops were computed using methodology of Oyekale (2012). Theresults show that even though production of majority of thecrops is sustainable but it will not be for very long. From 1966 to2011, crops like Wheat (0.6%), Cotton (0.4%), Maize (2.1%),Oilseeds (1.9%), Pulses (3.6%), Bajra (4.2%), Barley (4%),Sugarcane (2.3%), Jowar (4.6%) were sustainably cultivatedwhile rice (-1.4%) showed unsustainability. The findingssuggest that for sustainability of crop production in Punjab,there is need for crop diversification and shift from inputintensive agriculture to sustainable farming so as to conservenatural resources for future food security.