The COVID-19 pandemic, and in some sense responses to the COVID-19 pandemic(1), have hurt the worldwide economy - and that will impact poorer nations most.
India is cutting its agriculture 26 percent, to 44.6 billion, this fiscal year, and that has risks. This is not solar power or something else that is a luxury that only helps a few, food is a strategic resource. You wouldn't outsource your military to China or Russia(2) for the same reason that a month after Democrats were yelling at oil companies that they needed to cut oil production or else they were telling oil companies to increase production or else - a strategic resource, like energy or defense, is too important to risk handing to competitors.
Food is a strategic resource. Some countries, like England, haven't been able to feed themselves for a long time but they have the US even if everyone else turns on them. On energy, though, Europe made political theater out of nuclear energy and insisted alternative energy was ready to go, and when Russia began to shut off their gaslines, they were thrown into a panic and firing up old coal generators. They outsourced their strategic resource to Russia so they could pretend solar was viable and so Russia decided to take its neighbor knowing Europe would do nothing more than send ambulances to carry off Ukrainian bodies - and hope the US intervenes on Europe yet again.
Some of the reduction will be in "free" food during the pandemic and simply revert to lower-cost plans. Yet some is for agriculture itself and that is the risk. They are cutting fertilizer subsidies by over 60 percent, and that has repercussions. The best products are not made in India any more than they are made in Europe, so they will be expensive. Higher cost means less available and lower yields - like Sri Lanka saw when they tried to switch to organic food.
On the upside, India, like other countries in Asia, seems to have learned from Sri Lanka's weird organic food experiment, and is now ignoring white activists in wealthy countries telling them they don't need science. More scientific approaches to agriculture will mean less energy, less water, and fewer chemicals - that all means lower cost, and less need for subsidies.
They just have to make sure that the increase in yields using genetic engineering crosses over the decrease from less chemical inputs in time.
(1) Hair salons must be closed but tattoo parlors could stay open. The Governor of California who shut off nearly everything but tattoo parlors and head shops said he ate dinner with his friends without a mask at the French Laundry because Napa didn't have a lot of COVID cases. I could go on. The photo that outed him maskless was taken by a restaurant employee who cared more about actual public health than the guy running the state.
(2)Japan and Germany do outsource theirs to the US, but only because they lost World War II and had no choice)
