Agri-Environmental Vulnerability among G-20 Countries: A Composite Index Analysis

The global spread of intensive agricultural programs during the decade of 1960s brought food security, poverty reduction, and fiscal prosperity to an extent but also caused regional disparities and environmental degradation. As far as environmental degradation is concerned, it is a phenomenon that reflects the contamination of unwanted and harmful things in the physical components of our environment. The worldwide implementation of a high-yield varieties (HYV) program irrespective of the agro-climatic feasibility of the farmland brings severe degradation in the air, water, and soil (land) quality of the countries. In this paper, we are going to address the environmental performance of agriculture with the help of some agri-environmental indicators that reflects the unfavourable outcomes of intensive farming. We have extracted the data of five agri-environmental indicators from the World Bank Database for the pre-covid period of 2019 and tried to develop the ‘Agri-environmental Vulnerability Index’ among significantly industrialized and developing economies of the world i.e., G-20 Countries. We have classified them into four degrees of agri-environmental vulnerability by applying the composite index method. The results show that developing countries are at high risk of environmental degradation than developed countries. We have used tried and tested software like MS Excel and SPSS in the analysis.