Shorter, hotter, earlier: Shrinking spring cuts harvests
mardan — Adil Khan’s hopes for a good harvest are fading again this year as he inspects his orchard of apricot and loquat trees in the mountains of Pakistan’s northwest Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
Usually, fruit in the five-acre family orchard is ready to pick only by the last week of May. But this year, and in other recent years since 2013, much of the harvest has ripened by mid-April — nearly a month ahead of schedule. With less time to grow, the fruit is half its normal size — and his income is shrinking too, the 34-yearold farmer told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We are really at loss,” he said, pulling down a branch of tiny apricots. “The fruits have ripened in the middle of their growth.”
Pakistan’s farmers are struggling to bring in a harvest as the country’s weather patterns change as a result of climate change. Warm spring weather, now coming as early as March, has led to fruit trees flowering before bees arrive to pollinate them, for instance, or fruit and vegetables ripening at unusual times.
Farmer Muntazir Khan — who is not related to Adil — has seen his harvest of beets and tomatoes fall by 40 per cent this year on his 3-acre family farm in Taxila, about 35km from Islamabad, despite planting seeds on time and applying the right fertiliser. That huge drop, due the crops ripening in late March instead of late April, “means nearly no profits”, he said.
“I am scarcely able to recover the expenditures with such low yields,” Khan said, clutching a handful of freshly harvested beets.
The problem, the farmers agree, is that spring is getting shorter, hotter and earlier.
“We are clearly noticing that springs are not cool anymore and are increasingly becoming warmer, which is not good for our seasonal vegetable crops,” Adil Khan said.
His fruit requires cool weather from January to March to grow well, he said, but warmer days in February and March are now disrupting old patterns.
Pakistan’s weather officials say they’ve also noticed the shift.
“We have clearly observed through our weather monitoring stations all through Pakistan that springtime has not only warmed by more than 3ºC in recent years but also shrunk from 45 days to less than 10 days over last two decades,” said Ghulam Rasul, director general of the Pakistan Meteorological Department. “This is in no way a good omen for springtime vegetable and fruit farmers,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
He said at least 34 meteorological stations broke temperature records for March this year in most parts of the country, with temperatures sometimes more than 10ºC above the monthly long-term average between 1981 and 2010.
Nausherwan Nawab, a senior science officer at a vegetable research centre of the state-run National Agricultural Research Council, said lower spring temperatures of 20 to 25ºC a decade ago resulted in slow and steady ripening of spring fruits and vegetables. “But such is not the case anymore,” said Khuda Bakhsh, an agro-economy professor at the COMSATS Institute of Information Technology in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Once spring temperatures hit 35ºC, “vegetable production declines heavily”, he said.
Aslam Pakhali, chair of the All Pakistan Fruit and Vegetable Exporter and Importers Association, said nearly 30 per cent of the vegetables and fruits consumed in Pakistan are now imported. —