Scientists question study on pollution impacting wheat yield
CONTRADICTORY Slam US report, claim it is far from ground reality and effect exaggerated
NEW DELHI: Agriculture scientists on Wednesday questioned the credibility of a new study stating that India’s wheat production has fallen by 50% since 2010 because of rise in air pollution.
“I don’t think that (50%) reduction in wheat production was possible,” HS Gupta, director of the public sector Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI), said. “Smog has its impact on wheat production but not of the scale the study estimates.”
Rubbishing the claim, an agriculture ministry official termed it as “pure western media sensationalism” aimed at creating panic. He added that the Indian Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR) studies showed that smog had an impact on wheat production but not of the extent being claimed.
“Even in PUSA, our agriculture laboratory in Central Delhi, such impacts are not visible,” the official not willing to be named as he was not authorised to speak to media said. Gupta added that high smog can reduce sunlight in crop areas slowing down photosynthesis but it cannot reduce production by 50%.
Jennifer Burney of University of California at San Diego in the United States and V Ramanathan of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the study said that their statistical model suggested that averaged over India, yields in 2010 were up to 36% lower for wheat than they otherwise would have been, without climate and pollution emission trends.
Studies in India and abroad have also shown that high carbon and methane — two global warming causing gases — content in air can increase agriculture production as it enhances photosynthesis. Plants and trees do carbon sequestration and as the environment ministry estimates that 10% of carbon emissions from India are absorbed by the country’s forests.
Indian climate and agriculture scientists added that impact on production is also because of many other factors such as degrading soil quality, water crises and high chemical use in the sector.