Every year when I go to my village for Dashain vacation, I help my family in harvesting paddy. This year was no different. After we finished harvesting paddy this year, we decided that from then on we would leave our land barren. Not only us, but many others had also decided the same. The number of people doing so is growing day by day.

It is not that people do not want to farm, but the situation has forced them to give up farming. There are many reasons responsible to force farmers to take the decision of not continuing to farm any more. One of them is that there is hardly any profit, especially to those who own very little land. The price of seeds, equipments, pesticides and other many things needed for farming of crops are very high due to which it is very difficult for people to invest in farming. Even if they can invest, there is not much profit in it.

We need a lot of people, tools and equipments for farming and most of the farmers lack all of them. Thousands of young people who can work are leaving country on a daily basis. There are tools and equipments like tractors, machines to plant and cut crops, but most of them cannot be used especially in hilly region due to geography of farming lands.

It does not matter how much money one has, we simply cannot eat money. We need food to eat and they come from farms. If people stop farming, it will impact our economy as we have to import from other countries. We become dependent on others and its consequences are pretty clear right now.

We need to inspire people to go back to farming, but not as they do now. They can welcome modern farming techniques for better output. Our engineers need to develop tools that are suitable for Nepal and we as consumers have to give priority to our own products.