Sustainable agriculture in the midst of a drought

I'm getting quite perturbed by the agricultural situation in the country because it seems like farming is not a paying proposition anymore and financial distress in the farming community is rife. Add to this the drought situation prevalent in more than 200 districts in the country and we have a potentially disastrous situation on our hands.

I'm wondering if it is high-input agriculture that is the cause for distress among farmers - as somebody who has advocated hi-yielding varieties of crops to farmers I guess I am culpable but did we really have a choice at the time? With massive food shortages facing us in the 70s we couldnt possibly have consciously advocated continuing use of the traditional seeds of cereals and pulses, could we? At the time the higher yields and the greater incomes that farmers could garner from use of hi-yielding seeds and higher doses of inputs made eminent sense and indeed it ushered in a green revolution and saved us from becoming another basket case economy. But in hind-sight we know that what we advocated also resulted in massive removal of nutrients from soil and increased vulnerability to disease and pest attack necesitating even greater use of agro-chemicals which we now realise is a non-sustainable system.

But advocating sustainable agriculture in the midst of a drought doesnt seem like a workable proposition because yields are bound to drop when sustainable agricultural techniques are put in place. We may therefore simply have to carry on with the older hi-input format for atleast a couple of years before we implement Sustainable farming schemes. It is here that governments will need to step in and help farmers with inputs (not subsidies) to keep costs of cultivation within acceptable levels and to keep farmers out of the clutches of usurious money lenders.