For decades, the fertile farmlands around the historic city of Meerut, in India’s sugar bowl, were an unbroken sea of sugar cane fields. Not any longer: today cane fields are interspersed with smaller fields of new crops such as rice.

“The profit we get from selling one acre of rice is 50 per cent more than from selling one acre of cane,” says Thakur Sishpal Singh, 66, a farmer.