View: India’s food security is being choked by climate change
India last week suspended exports of non-basmati varieties of rice after heavy monsoon rainfall damaged newly planted crops 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 more grain for the domestic market. It’s not the only crop that’s in crisis.
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 from theft. One Twitter user said her sister brought 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of the vegetable in her luggage during a visit from her home in Dubai. Once again, heavy rainfall in tomato-producing states has been the culprit.
Up to 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, however: It’s typically in October and November that price spikes occur, when the country finds out whether damp weather has destroyed the winter crop in storage and the monsoon one in the fields.
New Delhi, facing general elections in the second quarter of 2024, has been stockpiling bulbs to quell such volatility. What’s remarkable about all this is that India as a whole isn’t having a particularly unusual monsoon. Rainfall has been about 5% above average levels so far, but total monsoon precipitation typically varies 10% in either direction from year to year.
Read more on economictimes.indiatimes.com
