India’s farms feel the heat

This year, a rainfall deficit of 23 per cent in India caused a food production decline worth Rs 20,000 crore (Rs 200 billion) in the summer season, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 29, 2009, 23:57:33 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan

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This year, a rainfall deficit of 23 per cent in India caused a food production decline worth Rs 20,000 crore (Rs 200 billion) in the summer season.

About 500 million people (45 per cent of the country’s population) are likely to be adversely affected because of this.

This is an indication of what changes in the Indian monsoon patterns, predicted by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), could do to the country’s agriculture in coming years.

The IITM had said climate change could make predicting rainfall more difficult and the frequency of extreme events (like the sudden rain in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh seen this year in late September) would increase.

About 64 per cent of the country’s population are dependent on agriculture and allied activities. Declines in farm productivity will affect this section of the population the most. This will lead to migrations to cities, which are already congested.

Agriculture contributes about 20 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

P.K. Aggarwal, national professor at the Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI), said: “Climate change can jeopardise our food security with 6-8 per cent agriculture production loss predicted for 2020. Our studies have shown that the entire agriculture belt from the north to the south will be affected,” said Aggarwal, who heads the national network on the impact, adaptation and vulnerability of Indian agriculture to climate change.

India’s agricultural production has been stagnant for the past five years at around 200 million tonnes. By 2020, demand for food is likely to increase by 30 per cent from the present levels (169 million tonnes of wheat and rice).

The national network has come out with 32 studies (some of the findings have been highlighted in the graphics) on what will happen to Indian agriculture because of temperature increases, whose projections have been made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A United Nations Population Fund report released in November says changes in monsoon patterns will affect 51 per cent of India’s agriculture land (16,20,388 sq km), making 420 million people in rural parts vulnerable to climate change.

“Women will suffer more as they account for 70 per cent of the total agriculture workforce in India,” the report said.

However, the problem can be mitigated with an expenditure of Rs 7,000 crore (Rs 70 billion) each year to combat climate change, proposed by the International Food Policy Research Institute, an international food policy think.

“The money is less than 30 per cent of what production loss due to climate change can cause to highly vulnerable nations like India,” said Ashok Gulati, director (Asia), International Food Policy Research Institute.

Abhijit Sen, member (agriculture), Planning Commission, said: “Eastern parts of India could be the future food bowl provided proper investments are made for providing irrigation and rural infrastructure in the region.”

For this to happen, the government will have to substantially increase investment in agriculture from Rs 17,825 crore (Rs 178.25 billion) now.

“We need more investment both from the public and private sectors to prepare ourselves for climate change scenarios,” Sen said.

If policy-makers decide on appropriate investments in time, future generations of farmers can get relief and continue with agriculture as a viable option.

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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