DEVELOPMENT: Failed Monsoon May Hit India’s Rain-fed Economy

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 26 2002 (IPS) - These days Deepak Khanna peers at the skies through the thick plate glass of his swanky showroom of electronic appliances, with the same anxiety that millions of farmers have as India faces its worst drought in a decade.

“If the monsoon fails there will be fewer buyers for my goods,” said Khanna, confirming the well-known fact that in India, and indeed most of South Asia, the economy is as much ‘rain-fed’ as is the agriculture on which several hundred million people subsist on the sub-continent.

Already, the government’s Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) has predicted a drop in the increase in foodgrain production to one percent compared to last year’s eight percent.

But that is no cause for worry as far as food security goes, because India is now sitting pretty with a 62 million tonne foodgrain surplus.

But the economy is another matter. It is estimated that every one percent increase in agriculture production translates into two billion U.S. dollars of extra cash in the hands of the farming community, which is what really supports the demand for manufactured goods.

No other climatic phenomenon affects the lives of so many people around the world on an annual basis than the monsoon.

India is only one of 20 countries in Asia whose agriculture and economy critically depend on a good summer monsoon — and these countries are where 95 percent of all rice is produced and consumed.

The impact of an abnormal monsoon is tremendous and can result in loss of seasonal employment, shortages of food and income, and the spread of disease with impact felt over subsequent years.

India has invested in one of the densest and most continuous surface climatological station networks in the tropics because, as is often said here, ‘scarcity is only a missed monsoon away.’

After 15 successive good monsoons, India seems to have run out of luck this year.

“The poor progress of the monsoons forces farmers to delay sowing and this in turn leads to poor harvest,” explains Devinder Sharma, a well-known agriculture and food security expert who agrees that the present drought is not about starvation but about overall economic decline that will hit trading and manufacturing.

Such is the fear of an adverse impact on the economy of a bad monsoon, or even rumours of it, that officials at the meteorological department — which uses state-of-art supercomputers to predict its wayward course — are cautioned not to speak to the press. Their silence is usually seen as sign of bad times.

This time, they were particularly silent after making their customary forecast of a “normal monsoon” in May, except to hint that the El Nino factor, which goes into the 16 basic parameters that make for a good monsoon, has been particularly worrisome this year. Thereafter, the meteorological officials clammed up, ominously.

Shivraj Singh Chauhan, a member of parliament from central India, has accused the meteorological department of making “erroneous predictions that the monsoons would arrive in late June or early July, causing enormous losses to millions of farmers who believed them and began sowing”.

When ruined farmers and their families began pouring into Delhi by the thousands looking for food and employment, there was no way to keep the droughts a secret. In the posh Nizamuddin area, close to the railway station alone are encamped some 5,000 people who have left their parched fields in central Madhya Pradesh state.

On Wednesday, with the situation looking truly grim and poor reports of the monsoon’s progress streaming in across a wide swathe, stretching from southern Kerala and Tamil Nadu states into the plains of northern India, Union Agriculture Minister Ajit Singh declared that drought to be “the worst and most widespread in the last 10-12 years”.

Said Singh: “Our belief is that crops like coarse cereals, oilseeds and grains have been damaged. Even if the rains come now productivity will suffer.”

According to Panjab Singh, director general of the prestigious Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the only way out now is for farmers to begin sowing alternative crops with a short gestation period which can still fit into the season.

Singh said Friday that ICAR would now get busy using its 400 institutes and centres across the country to spread the word among farmers that short duration crops are the answer and also make available varieties that can thrive in spite of water shortages. But he added that one way or another, India is in for a poor harvest this year.

Independent experts such as M S Swaminathan, who is based in southern Chennai city, said he was not sure that adequate seeds of alternative crops are readily available. “Just as grain reserves are essential for food security, seed reserves are necessary for crop security.”

Swaminathan has also been advocating what he calls the use of a “drought code” to mitigate the adverse impact of aberrant monsoons. The scientist, who has won the Ramon Magsaysay award known as Asia’s version of the Nobel prize, said it was too early to say if El Nino had anything to do with the current droughts but ” it is probable that there is some linkage”.

The country urgently needs to launch a food security and drought proofing compact consisting of an open-ended food guarantee scheme to launch a food for eco-development or greening of India movement, he said.

Likewise, he said, it needs a universal and user-friendly public distribution system as well as a mechanism to take care of drought and hunger hotspots.

“Thanks to the 65 million tonnes of wheat and rice in the godowns of FCI, we have now an uncommon opportunity for initiating such a compact,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) has released a study that cautions against undue pessimism over the drought and in fact goes to the extent of saying that a poor harvest might not be such a bad thing.

India, FICCI reasoned, has always lived through droughts, as more than 33 percent of the land area is chronically drought-prone with rainfall of less than 750 mm. Another 35 per cent of the area receives 750 to 1,125 mm rainfall and is also prone to drought.

Thus, 68 percent of the country is prone to drought in varying degrees in most areas.

According to the FICCI study, yet another good monsoon and bumper crop this year would only have added to the existing foodgrains stock of 62 million tonnes. This, it said, would have further dampened agriculture prices – and hurt rural incomes.