President Ramnath Kovind is visiting Myanmar from December 10 to 14. Among his engagements will be a visit to the Advanced Centre for Agricultural Research and Education and the Rice BioPark, both of which have been funded by India.
Agricultural technology is becoming an important skill that India is sharing with her neighbours in recent years under its development partnership thrust.
In Afghanistan, India has helped set up an Agriculture University in Kandahar. Students and faculty from Afghanistan are coming to Pusa in Delhi regularly for their training, while the university gets to stand on its own.
In his visit to India earlier this year, Nepal Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli had mentioned that Nepal needed to have food security and therefore needed to boost its agriculture sector. In one of the Memorandum of Understanding that the countries exchanged, they reaffirmed their “resolve to promote cooperation in agricultural science and technology, agricultural production and agro processing...''. Nepal has sought the help of the developed countries, too, to boost its agriculture, but its leaders believe that technology from nearby and similar terrain will certainly be better. India has agreed to work with Nepal in areas like animal husbandry and bio-fertilisers research in indigenous genetic resources and agroforestry.
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India has extensive agricultural partnership with ASEAN. The fourth ASEAN-India ministerial meeting on agriculture and forestry was held in Delhi earlier this year. The cooperation is in the areas of R and D for global competence in agriculture, seed quality control systems, organic certification for fruit and vegetable and new techniques for diagnosis of trans-border animal diseases.
A big focus of the ASEAN-India partnership is in the area of rice research, especially in genetic improvement of parental lines and developing heterotic rice hybrids.
Another agriculture partner of India in recent times is Israel, although in this partnership, India is the receiver of technology, specially drip irrigation.
