Shifting weather patterns making farming unviable

Diwali is here again. For business and for people it is a festival every Indian looks forward to. But think of the millions of farmers' whose crops are under water, and at many places have been flattened by strong winds or for those who are struggling to collect and dry the moisture-laden harvested crops.

Incessant and untimely rains for the past ten days in October have already caused extensive damage to paddy, coarse cereals, cotton, soybean, millets and vegetables. Reports say Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand have received 500 per cent more rains in the past one week, and heavy rains - eight times the normal - have battered standing crops in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Telengana. A few weeks earlier, standing crops in Punjab and Haryana too were lashed with heavy rains delaying the harvesting and marketing of the ripened crops. While the moisture content in harvested grains has gone up, the rise being between 21 to 50 per cent as reported from several parts of the country, and that too against the permissible limit of 17 per cent, drying the grains, its delayed marketing and land preparation for the subsequent crop is likely to push further the sowing of the winter season crops.

In UP alone, heavy rains have pounded over 1,400 villages, and after the rain waters have receded, field reports by the 'News Potli' web portal, perhaps the only news link carrying the ground happenings from rural India, brings out the difficulties farmers are left to encounter. While farmers find that even the stubble has been rendered useless, many kutchha dwellings have collapsed. Several small farmers from the flood-affected Gonda and Barabanki districts, whose paddy crops are still under water, say they had never seen such devastation from untimely rains in October.

No wonder, farm suicides after the heavy rains in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra had doubled between June and August, and with farm incomes badly hit elsewhere, it is further likely to add to what is known as marginalisation of farming. Often we have seen that with one bad crop season, the entire year's cropping system goes awry for farmers.

Even while several parts of the country were witnessing heavy rains, a continuous dry spell had prevailed earlier over eastern UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. While the farmers stare at misery, the question being asked then, and even now, in the wake of the continuous dry spell and subsequently the delayed withdrawal of the monsoon, remains the same – whether the unseasonal rains will lead to higher food inflation. As if the farm distress that continues to prevail is not enough, at no stage has the media and the mainline economists talked of the devastation the rains have brought to millions of farm livelihoods. In fact, the resulting farm misery and despair has been simply blacked out from public discourse. No questions have been raised about the additional suffering that farmers are now being forced to undergo and that too for no fault of theirs.

While the farmers' demand for a special girdwari or a crop harvest inspection to assess the crop loss is one way to seek compensation (which is rarely delivered in time) for the losses suffered, the failure of a comprehensive weather-linked crop insurance to automatically address the crisis and cover up for the losses suffered has only made the dwindling farm economy more vulnerable. Already we have seen farmers protesting time and again in various parts of the country demanding the previous year's crop compensation to be paid. This week, thousands of farmers led by Bharti Kisan Union (Ekta-Ugrahan) are protesting outside the Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann's residence in Sangrur, demanding the release of compensation for their damaged crops, and for adequate relief and rehabilitation for the cattle deaths from Lumpy skin disease.

Considering that the average farm income in 2018-19 from crop cultivation alone (does not include income from other non-farm activities) as worked out by the latest Situation Assessment Survey of the National Statistical Office (NSO) stands at a paltry Rs 27 per day, less than the income from a lactating cow, the dismay that prevails on the farm is difficult to imagine. With a daily income far less than what a MANREGA worker earns, farmers continue to survive at the bottom of the pyramid against all odds. And yet, they continue to produce a record crop harvest year after year.

This dichotomy is the result of a flawed economic thinking that is based on pushing farmers out of agriculture to join the daily wage workers class in the urban centres. We will talk more about it in subsequent columns, but let us first see how severe is the threat to food production from the recurring spell of heavy rains, heat waves, frequent droughts and other related forms of climate extremities. Heavy rains in September last year, followed by rains in December in some other parts of the country, and the kind of weather lapses we have seen this year should not come as a surprise anymore. What should be worrying us more is what many perceive it to be a norm rather than an exception.

Global warming is leading to changes in extreme rainfall patterns. From short, intense bursts – heavy downpour is becoming a sustained rainfall pattern. This is not driven by local conditions, but many experts clearly link it to warming oceans. Since oceans absorb 90 per cent of the heat generated over the land mass, they remain continuously warm thereby leading to an extension of the monsoon rainfall pattern. The change in the nature of rainfall behaviour, leading more to its erratic pattern, is actually leading to an extension of the monsoon season. This will impact crop cultivation, and more importantly impact food security in the future.

To ensure food security, the bigger challenge will be on how to ensure that farmers do not succumb to the climatic upheavals. While there are challenges for the scientific community to work out the technological and varietal responses to climate change, much important will be the economics of transformation that will surely need to be worked out. It means how to ensure that shifting weather patterns do not see the eclipse of the farming community. Given that agriculture is the largest employer, effort must shift to a climate coping mechanism that makes farming a viable enterprise. Whether it includes a new component of a climate-related payment in the pricing mechanism – to add a climate allowance to the comprehensive cost of crop production estimates that the Swaminathan Committee had suggested or it involves an efficient way of weather-related crop insurance or a combination of both, will perhaps point to reshaping of agriculture in an era of climate change.

A beginning can perhaps be made by waking up to the huge losses farmers have suffered in the past few weeks, the unfortunate outcome of an erratic weather pattern. Let us ensure that farmers too look forward to an exciting Diwali in the days to come.

(The author is a noted food policy analyst and an expert on issues related to the agriculture sector. He writes on food, agriculture and hunger)