A difficult summer ahead for agriculture

There’s no reason to panic (yet), but reports of the adverse impact of the early summer on the wheat crop should concern agricultural policymakers. It turns out that a dry and hot March may have reduced yields by at least 10%, perhaps more. That this has happened at a time when India hopes to fill the gap in the global wheat market caused by the disruption of Russian and Ukrainian exports is merely incidental (although that has seen a sharp increase in wheat prices, with farmers, naturally, preferring to sell to private firms rather than the government, as evident in early procurement numbers from the Food Corporation of India).

It would be a mistake to dismiss what happened this year as an aberration. This is what climate scientists have been warning against. Climate change, as evident from last month’s temperatures in the Antarctic, is not as linear or gradual a transformation as everyone thought it to be. Time and again, existing models of the climate crisis have been shown to be wanting. And, it has long been known that the two most obvious fallouts of the climate crisis — rising temperatures and sea levels — pose a threat to agriculture (among other things).

The question is: How are we preparing for this? And how climate-resilient is Indian agriculture? Given its dependence on the monsoons (another weather event very likely to be impacted by the climate crisis), the answer would be: Not very. The policy response to making agriculture climate resilient may range from drought-resistant seeds to, at a more macro-level, an entire change in cropping patterns, depending on water availability (this could immediately rule out basmati in Punjab, for instance) and temperatures. Hard decisions need to be taken — and we need to start talking about them now.