Giant landfills in India’s capital, New Delhi, have caught fire in recent weeks. Schools in the eastern Indian state of Odisha have been closed for a week, and schools in neighboring West Bengal supply oral hydration to children. On Tuesday, Rajgar, a city of more than 1.5 million people in central India, was the hottest in the country, with daytime temperatures peaking at 46.5 degrees Celsius (114.08 Fahrenheit). Temperatures exceeded 45 C (113 F) in nine other cities. But it was the March heat – the hottest in India since records were first kept in 1901 – that delayed crops. Wheat is very sensitive to heat, especially in the final stage when its kernels are ripening and ripening. Indian farmers time their planting so that this stage coincides with the usually cooler spring of India. Climate change has made India’s heat wave hotter, said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London. He said that before human activities could raise global temperatures, heat waves like this year would hit India once in about half a century. “But now it is a much more common event – we can expect such high temperatures about once every four years,” he said. India’s vulnerability to overheating increased by 15% from 1990 to 2019, according to a 2021 report by medical journal The Lancet. It is among the top five countries where vulnerable people, such as the elderly and the poor, have the highest exposure to heat. She and Brazil have the highest heat-related mortality in the world, the report said. Farmers like Baldev Singh are among the most vulnerable. Singh, a farmer in Sangur in the northern Indian state of Punjab, watched his crop shrink before his eyes as a usually cool spring quickly shifted to unrelenting heat. He lost about a fifth of his performance. Others lost more. “I’m afraid the worst is yet to come,” Singh said. Punjab is India’s “grain bowl” and the government has encouraged the cultivation of wheat and rice here since the 1960s. It is usually the largest contributor to India’s national reserves and the government hoped to buy about a third of this year. stock from the area. However, government estimates predict lower yields this year, and Devinder Sharma, an agricultural policy expert in the northern city of Chandigarh. said he expected to get 25% less. The story is the same in other major wheat producing states such as Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. In total, India bought over 43 million metric tonnes (47.3 million tonnes) of wheat in 2021. Sharma estimates it will get 20% to almost 50% less. Although it is the second largest producer of wheat in the world, India exports only a small part of its crop. It was trying to take advantage of the global cessation of wheat supplies from Russia’s war in Ukraine and find new markets for its wheat in Europe, Africa and Asia. This seems uncertain given the difficult balance the government has to maintain between supply and demand. It takes about 25 million tons (27.5 million tons) of wheat for the huge food welfare program that typically feeds more than 80 million people. Before the pandemic, India had vast reserves that far exceeded its domestic needs – a security reserve against the risk of famine. These stocks have been squeezed, Sharma said, by distributing free grain during the pandemic to some 800 million people – vulnerable groups such as migrant workers. The program was extended until September, but it is unclear whether it will continue after that. “We are no longer in such a surplus. . . “With exports increasing now, there would be a lot of pressure on domestic wheat availability,” Sharma said. The Federal Ministries of Agriculture and Trade of India did not respond to inquiries sent to them by email. Aside from India, other countries are also facing poor yields that are hampering their ability to offset a possible shortage of supplies from Russia and Ukraine, usually the world’s largest and fifth largest grain exporters. China’s Agriculture Minister Tang Renjian said last month that the winter wheat harvest was likely to be poor, hampered by floods and planting delays.
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