It’s supposedly August in Delhi, but once I look at my chilli and basil plants, they tell a different story. These terrace plants are running away from the sun and not towards it. The fragrant basil leaves look parched each noon, reminding me of the summer.
Delhi, and India, are experiencing a drought-like August. The figures speak for themselves as India reported its driest and hottest August since 1901. Reports also suggest this may be the second-driest August Delhi has ever seen (the driest was in 2022).
Reports from the west and south, including southwest Rajasthan, Gujarat and all the way down to Maharashtra and Karnataka, are not good. All of these areas have received below average rainfall.
India is currently in the El Niño year and was expecting disruption in monsoons which may lead to droughts and food security problems. The predictions seem to be coming true as August reported 36% below normal rainfall. The southern peninsula reported 60% below average rainfall, alarming rain-fed farmers in these areas. These fears have also started to ring in the government’s ears, as there was a 20% increase demand for work under the MGNREGA due to the vagaries of the weather.
Farmers already gauging the situation have decreased paddy acreage by 384 hectares, a 4% drop from the previous five-year average. Farmers in India’s food bowl Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh in the north are also suffering the brunt of untimely rainfall. From Himachal Pradesh to Punjab in Pakistan, rainfall and floods have battered farmers and others. Other crops like legumes, oilseeds and paddy are affected by changing weather patterns. In retrospect, Cyclone Biparjoy heralded the monsoon deficit for the subcontinent.
The IMD may have predicted normal rainfall for September, but the government’s aggressive ban on rice exports and other custom duties on vegetables and other food products clear point to another reality. Our policy makers are deeply concerned about the imminent food crisis. If its doesn’t rain as expected in September, the rain-fed areas will undergo deep hardship, increasing pressure on the government. The people with irrigation options or “underground boring” will be heavily dependent on the ever-shrinking surface and ground water resources. Because there is no way the farmers or the government can afford another below average harvest. The Rabi harvests have been below average for the past two years now. Kharif over the last couple of years hasn’t been the best either. Untimely rainfall, heatwaves and hailstorms have done the most damage across the subcontinent.
Indian food stocks have already depleted and many police makers and farmers were hoping for a good harvest, but it seems nature has other plans.
Agro-climatic crisis?
It’s time to zoom out a bit, and ask certain questions: What has been happening to India? Are things really changing agriculturally? Are we headed into a food crisis? The short answer to the last two questions, from everything we know so far, is yes.
The first phase of the agro-climate crisis – prolonged climate agrarian disruptions – became visible in 2019, with disrupted monsoons, floods and eight tropical cyclones. As per a global report on climate change, India “was the seventh most-affected by the devastating impact of climate change globally in 2019,” with changing climate eating as much as 0.72% of the country’s GDP.
Adding to the wound was the unusual 2020 locust attack. This was reportedly the biggest such attack in over three decades. Locusts damaged crops all across the western and northern subcontinent. The untimely rainfall provided new breeding grounds for locusts in western India. This was another symptom of the agro-climate crisis building up.
Also read: Is Indian Agriculture Following Two Policies – One at WTO and Another at Home?
2021 again showed untimely rainfalls and the IMD pointed out six states receiving decreased rainfall, while 12 states had excessive rainfall. Overall, about 40% of the 703 districts in India had average rainfall. In six years (2015-21), India lost 33.9 million hectares of crop land to floods and excess rains and 35 million hectares to drought – numbers which are likely to increase as years progress.
By 2022, we see the pattern re-emerging with dampened Rabi harvests, untimely kharif rains and kharif paddy production dropping by 6%. Meanwhile, heat-related deaths increased by 55% in 17 years. The victims were not just humans, but also the Rabi wheat crop in north India, which reportedly shrank by at least 13.5%. The government was quick to ban wheat exports, while trying to curtail public panic. Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her parliament address even said, “It (agriculture) grew by 3.0% in 2021-22 compared to 3.3% in 2020-21” and blamed the changing climate for it. She plainly also spelt out that India needs to “re-orient” its policy to tackle the challenge of climate change.
Even a Punjab Agriculture University study concurs with the finance minister’s view and predicts that Punjab by 2050 will be grappling with changing climate and experience significant yield loss due to rising temperatures.
The 2022-23 Rabi was no different. Different parts of India experience climatic issues, mainly untimely rainfall. Punjab and other parts of the country were affected. And then came Biparjoy, tearing into the western subcontinent and drying up our monsoons.
This is when the second, economic phase of the agro-climatic crisis is reached – hyper food inflation. From tomatoes and onions, now the inflation is reaching other staples like legumes and vegetables. Fodder prices are increasing gradually, as the Indian system is losing its resilience because of climate disruptions. A majority of government schemes have failed to build infrastructure or freight networks for storage and preventing climate-related harvest damages. From hailstorms in Kashmir to a dry August in Karnataka, farmers are least prepared, and hence harvest losses will increase.
Keep in mind that our strategic food reserves are at their lowest, and 800 million are directly fed from the government’s public distribution system. With the rupee floating around 82-83 to the dollar and the Ukraine-Russia conflict still escalating, we can’t really depend on the international market for our food needs.
This brings us to the third stage of the agro-climate food crisis – the convergence phase. If the kharif harvest fails or is again below average, Indian food security will be deeply impacted due to the compounding of climate-related agrarian losses. We will be in the third stage of the crisis once the agriculture production is hampered and the economic measures fail to control hyper-food inflation.
Two or three cycles of this pattern, and any country is looking straight at a full blown agro-climate crisis. Bad harvests, repeated climate disruptions, hyper-food inflation, scarcity and no international supplies together are a malnutrition time bomb. If our agrarian trajectory is not changed, 2024 or 2025 maybe the years where a full nutritious meal is a privilege few can afford.
Indra Shekhar Singh is an independent agri-policy analyst and writer. He was the former director, policy and outreach, NSAI. He also hosts The Wire agri-talk show ‘Krishi ki baat/Farm Talks’. He tweets on @indrassingh.
