Worse, rains are hampering the sowing of winter wheat, coarse grains and oilseeds, putting further pressure on food inflation that touched a two-and-a-half month high at 14.44% on Thursday.
Across the country, farmers are helplessly watching their fields turn into muddy pools and crops to mulch. A good monsoon and prospects of a bountiful kharif harvest had led the government to confidently claim that food would turn cheaper after the harvest is in by October.
India grows major commercial crops such as rice, pulses, soyabean, groundnuts, corn, rubber, coffee, tea, cotton and sugarcane, onions, spices and tomatoes in summer.
For Meera Devi of village Dharampur in Solan district of Himachal Pradesh, 2010 has been a destructive year. “In 2009, we didn’t have rains and this year there was so much of it that fields were flooded, weeds were overgrown and I felt helpless. Even after working in rains, I was just able to get marginal returns from tomato, french beans, pumpkin, capsicum and peas,” she says. In a normal year, vegetables fetch her Rs 1.5 lakh per acre.
By end-October, the north had received 359% extra rain, central India 100%, Tamil Nadu 20% and the country as a whole 40%. Maharashtra has officially pegged rain-related damage at 1.2 million hectares. Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Gujarat, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh are totting up losses.
Crop damage and the ensuing price spiral affects every Indian household and business one way or another. Export of spices and cotton are down.
In the last three months, the price of rice has risen to Rs 22 per kg from Rs 18 a kg, sugar to Rs 35 per kg from Rs 31 a kg, mustard oil to Rs 74 per litre from Rs 66 a litre, tea to Rs 200 per kg from Rs 185 a kg, onions to Rs 52 per kg from Rs 20 a kg, and apples to Rs 97 per kg from Rs 56 a kg.
High market prices have become irrelevant for farmers with decimated harvests.
Among cereals, paddy received a double whammy of drought in West Bengal, Jharkhand and parts of Bihar, and rains in other states. In Maharashtra’s Konkan region, 4 lakh hectares of paddy fields are officially damaged. In Punjab and Haryana, arrivals are 1 million tonnes less than last year.
Maize, fed to chicken and mainly grown in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, has been hit by fungus due to high moisture. “In Maharashtra you cannot find any material with less then 8% fungal damage,” says poultry giant Suguna Group’s Deputy General Manager R Ramakrishnan.
Rains wiped away hopes of a bumper pulses crop in main grower Maharashtra. State agriculture department says area under moong and urad rose by half, and under tur by a fifth. But rains during harvest damaged moong and urad dal’s quality while pests that flourish in cloudy weather attackedtur.