Passage - 3
Food consumption patterns have changed substantially in India over the past few decades. This has resulted in the disappearance of many nutritious foods such as millets. While food grain production has increased over five times since independence, it has not sufficiently addressed the issue of malnutrition. For long, the agriculture sector focussed on increasing food production particularly staples, which led to lower production and consumption of indigenous traditional crops/grains, fruits and other vegetables, impacting food and nutrition security in the process. Further, intensive, monoculture agriculture practices can perpetuate the food and nutrition security problem by degrading the quality of land, water and food derived through them.

Based on the above passage, the following assumptions have been made :
1. To implement the Sustainable Development Goals and to achieve zero-hunger goal, monoculture agriculture practices are inevitable even if they do not address malnutrition.
2. Dependence on a few crops has negative consequences for human health and the ecosystem.
3. Government policies regarding food planning need to incorporate nutritional security.
4. For the present monoculture agriculture practices, farmers receive subsidies in various ways and government offers remunerative prices for grains and therefore they do not tend to consider crop diversity.

Which of the above assumptions are valid ?

Question

Passage - 3
Food consumption patterns have changed substantially in India over the past few decades. This has resulted in the disappearance of many nutritious foods such as millets. While food grain production has increased over five times since independence, it has not sufficiently addressed the issue of malnutrition. For long, the agriculture sector focussed on increasing food production particularly staples, which led to lower production and consumption of indigenous traditional crops/grains, fruits and other vegetables, impacting food and nutrition security in the process. Further, intensive, monoculture agriculture practices can perpetuate the food and nutrition security problem by degrading the quality of land, water and food derived through them.

Based on the above passage, the following assumptions have been made :
1. To implement the Sustainable Development Goals and to achieve zero-hunger goal, monoculture agriculture practices are inevitable even if they do not address malnutrition.
2. Dependence on a few crops has negative consequences for human health and the ecosystem.
3. Government policies regarding food planning need to incorporate nutritional security.
4. For the present monoculture agriculture practices, farmers receive subsidies in various ways and government offers remunerative prices for grains and therefore they do not tend to consider crop diversity.

Which of the above assumptions are valid ?

Accepted Answer

Correct Option: 2 and 3 only Let us evaluate the four assumptions based on Passage 3: 1. 'To implement Sustainable Development Goals... monoculture agriculture practices are inevitable...' - The passage explicitly states that intensive monoculture practices degrade land, water, and food quality, perpetuating food and nutrition security problems. It does not state they are inevitable for SDGs; in fact, it warns against them. Thus, assumption 1 is invalid. 2. 'Dependence on a few crops has negative consequences for human health and the ecosystem.' - The passage notes that focusing on staples led to lower production of indigenous traditional crops, impacting food and nutrition security, and monoculture degrades land and water. This validates assumption 2. 3. 'Government policies regarding food planning need to incorporate nutritional security.' - The passage points out that past focus on food production alone did not address malnutrition and impacted nutrition security, implying that policies must incorporate nutritional security. This validates assumption 3. 4. 'For present monoculture agriculture practices, farmers receive subsidies... and therefore do not tend to consider crop diversity.' - While subsidies and prices might be real-world factors, the passage *does not* mention government subsidies or procurement prices for monoculture. Assumptions must be derived *strictly* from the passage text. Thus, assumption 4 is invalid. Therefore, only assumptions 2 and 3 are valid. Option (b) is correct.

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