A poor harvest in the offing?

Board of India has predicted a nine per cent dip in production for the 2016-17 season in comparison with the previous season. The Union Minister for Commerce and Industry, Nirmala Sitharaman, in a written reply to the Lok Sabha on March 27 said that the major reason behind the decline was erratic rainfall in February and March this year in the Western Ghats, the area where most of India's coffee is grown. She said that diseases like the white stem borer were affecting Arabica coffee, the main cultivar of coffee grown in India. Changing climatic conditions like high temperature had further aggravated the problem.

The outlook for the kharif crop across India is also doubtful at the moment. While the first government forecast for the summer monsoon of 2017 will be out by mid-April, predictions on its performance have already begun. Private weather forecaster Skymet Weather has predicted below-normal rainfall (95 per cent of the long period average of 887 mm) in the peak monsoon months, between June and September this year. The western India is likely to experience a deficient rainfall. This prediction is based on indications that El Nino-like conditions could develop in the equatorial Pacific Ocean during the second half of the June-September season. Weather Risk, another private forecasting agency, has predicted that El Nino is likely to have a negative impact on the southwest monsoon during the later part of the monsoon.