Climate change is putting the food security of India at threat

livemint.com:

The world’s most populous nation is more poorly endowed with farmland per capita than Greece or Algeria. That is going to make life harder as a fast warming planet destabilizes the cycles of rain and sunshine that have kept the Indian subcontinent fed for millennia. India recently suspended exports of non-Basmati varieties of rice after heavy monsoon rainfall damaged crops that were due to be harvested in winter.

With rice retail prices up 3% in the past month and 11.5% over the past year, the government hopes to quell food inflation by reserving grain for the domestic market. Tomato prices have risen fivefold or more in recent months, prompting heists from stores, markets and trucks, and causing farmers to camp out in their fields to protect their produce. A Twitter user said her sister brought 10kg of the vegetable in her luggage during a visit from her home in Dubai.

Heavy rainfall in tomato-producing states was the culprit. Until now, India’s most politically contentious crop has remained largely immune. Onion prices, blamed for the fall of governments in 1980, 1998 and 2014, have only risen modestly in recent months.

That’s no guarantee that the situation will stabilize: It’s usually in October and November that prices spike, when the country finds out whether damp weather destroyed the winter crop in storage and the monsoon one in fields. The central government, which faces general elections in 2024, has been stockpiling bulbs to quell such volatility. Remarkably, India as a whole hasn’t had a particularly unusual monsoon.