Indian Agriculture Threatened by Drought
Drought is something we think of as being substantial and dramatic – months in which rain doesn’t fall, monsoons that never happen. But the truth about drought is that it is much more insidious – when average rainfall drops, crops fail even though rain happens and can appear plentiful.
Monsoon failure threatens farmers
In India, right now, the monsoon is failing to deliver. Yes, there has been rain most days between June and now, but the actual rainfall has been only a quarter of the usual vast deluge. Around 80% of India’s agricultural land is close to drought conditions, and the monsoon rains will end in September. The fear is twofold: that the rains won’t arrive, and that they will, telescoping immense rainfalls into the last few weeks of monsoon and causing flash floods and subsidence. This year’s rainfalls, so far, are the weakest since 2002, and 2002 was the worst year for Indian agriculture for more than fifty years. Food security is fragile in a country with a young population, greedy for consumer goods, and unwilling to spend hours on cultivating subsistence crops.
Less food means less economic security
The worse hit crop is rice, a key staple in India and an export crop and one that needs constant irrigation. Sugar has been badly damaged by the lack of rainfall too. And because less than half the croplands of India are irrigated, the other half depend entirely on the monsoon to deliver enough water to soak the soil and make it plantable. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, a state that is a leading producer of sugar, 47 out of 71 districts have been declared drought zones. While the economic cost is high, because there aren’t going to be enough crops for export, the social cost is even higher – around 700 million rural dwellers depend absolutely on subsistence agriculture for their daily food.
Food doesn’t reach those who need it most
Large crop surpluses stored over the past two years mean that the Indian government has been able to guarantee food support to the whole population, but there are already reports of people hoarding sugar and rice, and problems are expected to spiral as officials ‘set aside’ the rations meant for villagers and then sell them on the black market. Rice has already increased in price by more than 10% since the poor rains started.
Paddy planting courtesy of Diganta Talukdar at Flickr under a creative commons licence
