Scientists rubbish study saying air pollution can reduce wheat yield by 50%

Agriculture scientists have questioned the credibility of a new study stating that India’s wheat production in India has fallen by 50% since 2010 because of rise in air pollution.

Updated on: Nov 5, 2014, 20:55:41 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Agriculture scientists have questioned the credibility of a new study stating that India’s wheat production in India has fallen by 50% since 2010 because of rise in air pollution.

“I don’t think that (50%) reduction in wheat production was possible,” said H S Gupta director of the public sector Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI). “Smog has its impact on wheat production but not of the scale the study estimates”.

Contrary to the claim in the study of the dip in production, the World Bank data shows that per hectare wheat yield in India has increased from 2,581 kg in 2009 to 2,975 in 2012. Soon after Independence when the air was relatively clean, per hectare yield was just 633 kg hinting that the link between air pollution related smog and production was not as big as being claimed in the study.

Jennifer Burney of University of California at San Diego in the United States and V Ramanathan of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the study said that their statistical model suggested that averaged over India, yields in 2010 were up to 36% lower for wheat than they otherwise would have been, absent climate and pollution emission trends.

Rubbishing the claim, an agriculture ministry official termed it as “pure western media sensationalism” aimed at creating panic. He added that the Indian Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR) studies showed that smog had an impact on wheat production but not of the extent being claimed.

“Even in PUSA, our agriculture laboratory in Central Delhi, such impacts are not visible,” the official not willing to be quoted as he was not authorised to speak to media said. Gupta added that high smog can reduce sunlight in crop areas slowing down photosynthesis but it cannot reduce production by 50%.

The ICAR had estimated that India’s wheat production can go down by 30% by 2050 because of climate change and rise in pollutants if no corrective steps are taken. The ICAR estimate has been widely accepted across the world.

Studies in India and across the world have also shown that high carbon and methane --- two global warming causing gases --- content in air can increase agriculture production as it enhances photosynthesis. Plants and trees do carbon sequestration and as the environment ministry estimates that 10% of carbon emissions from India are absorbed by the country’s forests.

India climate and agriculture scientists, however, agree with the study that reduction in air pollution and climate change causing gases can improve yields but added that impact on production is because of multiple factors such as degrading soil quality, water crises and high chemical use in the sector.

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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