After a troublesome two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, Manjeet Singh was hopeful that 2022 would convey some cheer. A farmer from Harigarh village in Punjab’s Barnala district, Singh owns 4 hectares of farmland, his solely supply of livelihood. But a sequence of extreme weather events this yr led to monetary losses, dampening the optimistic observe he began the yr with.
There was a sudden surprising improve in temperature in March this yr. This coincided with the time the wheat crop was at a maturing stage, he shares. As a consequence, there was a drop in manufacturing. Wheat manufacturing from Singh’s farm, in earlier years, has been about 48 quintals-50 quintals per hectare. This yr, his farm produced solely 38 quintals per hectare – a drop of about 10 quintals per hectare. This, in flip, introduced down his revenue by Rs 20,000 per hectare. Singh will get Rs 2,015 per quintal because the minimal assist value set by the federal government.
“If this was not enough, my paddy crop, too, suffered losses due to recent rainfall,” added Manjeet Singh. He explains, “When the crop was almost ready to harvest, there was heavy rainfall in the last week of September, followed by another two-day rain spell on October 7 and 8.” The surprising heavy rain, he mentioned, extended harvesting and elevated his enter price on anti-pesticide sprays. It additionally decreased crop manufacturing by 7 quintals-8 quintals per hectare and with that, there was additional lack of revenue.
The variations in weather are more and more difficult for the agriculture sector. As per India Meteorological Department, September rainfall was in extra of 82% in Haryana, a file after 1945. Similarly, Punjab additionally obtained 30% extra rain, the primary time since 1988.
There is important crop loss related to these weather events. In Punjab, as Gurvinder Singh, director of the state’s agriculture division, informed Mongabay-India, rainfall in September broken 1.39 lakh hectares of paddy space. This is almost 5% of the whole crop space of three million hectares in the state. Similarly, unseasonal heavy rain broken almost 20% of the 1.3-million-hectare crop space beneath paddy in Haryana, knowledgeable Hardeep Kadian, director of the agriculture division in the state.
Singh, the Punjab agriculture director, estimates a manufacturing lack of 2% to five% in the state, whereas Kadian says manufacturing harm could contact 10% in Haryana.
Besides Punjab and Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, the second-largest rice-producing state, obtained unseasonal heavy rainfall in October when farmers had been preparing for harvest. India Meteorological Department’s newest knowledge revealed that 65 out of 75 districts in Uttar Pradesh obtained massive extra rainfall.
The in-charge of Uttar Pradesh agriculture division’s statistics wing Rajesh Kumar Gupta informed Mongabay-India that the whole paddy space in Uttar Pradesh this yr is 5.9 million hectares. At the start of the season, poor rainfall had affected nearly 1.5 million hectares of sowing. “We made a handsome recovery with sufficient rainfall in August and September. But just before the harvesting, extreme rainfall in the first ten days of October damaged paddy area up to 2.5 lakh hectares,” knowledgeable Gupta. He mentioned, “This, we fear, will bring our paddy production down from 16 million tonnes in 2021 to 14.5 to 15 million tonnes this year, a production loss of approximately 10%.”
This actually will not be excellent news for India’s rice manufacturing, which already fell by 6% in the Union agriculture ministry’s first advance estimates launched on September 21.
The paddy season was already affected by poor rainfall and subsequent fall in paddy areas in Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh. Then, after the rain-deficient sowing interval, the surplus rainfall simply earlier than harvesting, in vital rice-producing states, cast a additional shadow, with losses in general crop manufacturing this yr.
GV Ramanjaneyulu, govt director at Centre for Sustainable Agriculture in Hyderabad, informed Mongabay-India that general, the loss to rice manufacturing this yr might contact 10% because of current weather events.
On authorities’s radar
While union agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar just lately acknowledged in parliament that there was no meals grain disaster in the nation, the influence of extreme weather on agriculture is being recognised in authorities insurance policies. The Centre, on September 9, roughly two weeks earlier than releasing the primary crop estimate, banned the export of damaged rice in the wake of manufacturing issues and home demand. Similarly,in May, the nation banned wheat export after unseasonal excessive temperatures in March affected the crop manufacturing. As per India Meteorological Department’s, March was the warmest since 1901, when temperature record-keeping started in the nation.
Pavneet Kaur Kingra, head of the Department of Climate Change and Agricultural Meteorology at Punjab Agricultural University, informed Mongabay-India that the temperature rise restricted the event of the grain, resulting in shrivelling of wheat grains. While the typical temperature hike could also be 4%, there have been days when the temperature had hiked by 7%-8%, Kingra added.
On how one ought to interpret the rise in temperature, she mentioned that it’s a clear signal of local weather variability, which is influenced by local weather change and world warming.
Huge land loss
Hydro-meteorological calamities, together with heavy rainfall and floods, have broken 33.9 million hectares of India’s cropped space between 2015-16 and 2021-22, as per the ministry of agriculture knowledge tabled in the current monsoon session of parliament.
The drought – an occasion arising out of scanty and poor rainfall – was equally damaging. About 35 million hectares of cropped space (the place crop loss was 33% and above) was broken between 2016-17 to 2021-22, in response to knowledge obtained by this journalist in the final week of October, beneath the Right to Information Act, supplied by the drought administration cell of the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare.
A detailed take a look at each these knowledge units revealed that Rajasthan, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra had been among the many most affected states, which confronted crop losses from drought and extra rainfall. Other states the place floods and heavy rains had been predominant components for crop loss had been Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, and Odisha.
The reality that the majority of those affected states usually are not geographically linked signifies that the difficulty of local weather variability and its influence on agriculture is widening.
These states had been additionally discovered weak in India Meteorological Department’s 2021 report, which studied monsoon rainfall variability over 30 years (1989- 2018). The India Meteorological Department report revealed that seven states witnessed lowering rainfall developments throughout these years, whereas 12 states witnessed rising rainfall developments throughout the identical interval. India Meteorological Department analysis of this year’s monsoon presents a comparable development. It revealed that solely 40% out of 703 districts in India had common rainfall.
In 2016, the Ministry of Science and Technology launched a report which mentioned that agriculture in the nation was extremely vulnerable to local weather change. The unsure weather, particularly drought, could have an effect on manufacturing loss and the standard of fruits as massive areas of agriculture had been nonetheless rainfed, the report mentioned.
As per the ministry of agriculture knowledge, 67.79 million hectares out of 180 million hectares of whole agricultural land in India continues to be unirrigated. This makes 40% of the agriculture in the nation dependent on rain, which is now continually experiencing variations. These vulnerabilities will have a direct influence on folks. The International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Food Policy 2022 report has warned that local weather change could push 90 million Indians in direction of starvation by 2030. It has listed a decline in agricultural manufacturing and disruption in the meals provide chain, the explanation for the longer term disaster.
Need stronger insurance policies
As per the agriculture ministry’s assertion in parliament, the federal government is discovering methods and initiating steps to deal with the rising temperature and heavy rainfall. It claimed to have carried out field-trails of 177 varieties developed by the Indian Council of Agriculture Research and totally different state agriculture universities for local weather extremes like floods, droughts, warmth waves and so forth. The ministry additionally claimed to have formulated the District Agriculture Contingency Plan for 650 districts to mitigate the influence of weather-related challenges.
But in response to specialists, authorities motion is insufficient because the challenges are larger.
Director at Bengaluru-based Foundation for Agrarian Studies, Sandipan Baksi informed Mongabay-India that the vulnerability in agriculture because of extreme climate-related events is a actuality. “But the problem is that a scientific intervention needed to absorb the climate shock is missing,” he added.
Baksi mentioned that the nation wants to extend public spending on irrigation to cope with rising vulnerabilities. It wants enchancment in rural infrastructure, extra expenditure on extension providers, sustainable farming, crop diversification, and so forth.
“Our last year’s research report on trends of public spending in India between 2010 and 2020 found that the overall public expenditure on agriculture has decreased (from 11% to 9.5% between 2010-11 and 2019-20). In that situation, there is no way we can meet the future challenges,” he added.
Safety web?
Marginal and small farmers, as per the 2015-16 agriculture census, account for 86% of whole farmers in India and are probably the most weak to extreme weather events. Experts advocate protecting measures for these weak farmers.
A senior chief of Sanykt Kisan Morcha, Darshan Pal says that local weather vulnerability is the brand new distressed issue, particularly amongst marginal and small farmers as a result of their shock absorbing capability is much lower than massive farmers. The Sanykt Kisan Morcha was a part of the farmers’ motion final yr, resulting in a policy-level change in India.
“Ideally, there should be safety nets to protect all categories of farmers against extreme climate events. Crop insurance can be one among other concrete solutions. But right now, the existing crop instance model is faulty and hardly benefitting the farmers,” he added.
According to him, the farmers need an efficient crop insurance system. The mannequin needs to be such that it ensures that a farmer ought to get compensation for lack of crop on even one-acre land.
The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development has additionally underlined the poor efficiency of crop insurance. In a ebook revealed just lately, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development has argued that crop insurance is not a “perfect medication” for farmers hit by pure calamities.
Economist RS Deshpande who has written the ebook, referred to as for a full revamping of crop insurance. Otherwise, a disaster is about to mount on farmers. Deshpande is at present related to Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru.
In a phrase of warning, Sandipan Baksi says that agriculture in India nonetheless suffers from very low yields and manufacturing. “Attributing each and every event to climate change without proper research may prevent some of the essential measures to expand production, leaving the marginalised sections in a state of continued vulnerability,” he added.
This article first appeared on Mongabay.
