Rising mercury may take toll on fruits, vegetables

Temperature to increase by 2°C, hitting food production: Study. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 10, 2012, 01:53:07 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The rising mercury is set to make you break into a not-so-cold sweat in more ways than one. If a government study is to be believed, the temperature in India is expected to increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius by 2030 – causing the production of fruits and vegetables to plummet.

The study, recently submitted to the United States Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said fruits and vegetables are most vulnerable to extreme weather changes. “Periodic high temperature and soil moisture stress conditions cause drastic reduction in yields,” it said.

The study was conducted by over 200 scientists from 17 public institutes.

The vegetables likely to be affected are potato, onion and tomato – consumed the most in India, resulting in substantial price rise in recent years. Among fruits, grapes, apples and mangoes would witness the maximum fall in production if no adaptation measures are taken, the report said.

Their scarcity will be on account of various climatic reasons, it said. Onion production is projected to fall further in high-yielding states such as Maharashtra and Karnataka, where the temperature has seen a higher rise, than ones like Gujarat. The delay in monsoon rains will impact grapes, and reduced winter precipitation will cause a fall in apple production, the report said.

The impact of climate change on perishables is already being felt, with 59% of the country’s meteorological districts reporting deficit rainfall. This has affected the overall production of kharif crops.

The rising temperatures will cause water scarcity, although there will not be any major deviation in overall monsoon rainfall. “There will be more instances of heavy rainfall, coupled with more dry days in monsoon months,” the report said.

As a result, the per capita availability of water would fall to 1,140 cubic metres by 2050 from the current 1,654. It was as high as 5,177 cubic metres in 1951. The water in major rivers such as Indus and Ganga will fall by 2020, but will rise in the Brahmaputra because of faster melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Those in cities should brace themselves for more humid summers, with rainfall levels expected to rise by 7%, and warmer nights, with the temperature expected to rise by 4-5 degrees Celsius – except in peninsular India.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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