India: Record heatwave stunts wheat production, export plans

An unusually early, record-shattering heat wave in India has reduced wheat yields, raising questions about how the country will balance its domestic needs with ambitions to increase exports and make up for shortfalls due to Russia's attacks on Ukraine.

Gigantic landfills in India's capital New Delhi have caught fire in recent weeks. Schools in eastern Indian state Odisha have been shut for a week and in neighbouring West Bengal, schools are stocking up on oral rehydration salts for kids.

On Tuesday, Rajgarh, a town in central India, was the country's hottest., with daytime temperatures peaking at 46.5 degrees Celsius (114.08 Fahrenheit). Temperatures breached the 45 C (113 F) mark in nine other cities.

But it was the heat in March — the hottest in India since records first started being kept in 1901 — that stunted crops. Wheat is very sensitive to heat, especially during the final stage when its kernels mature and ripen. Indian farmers time their planting so that this stage coincides with India's usually cooler spring.

Climate change has made India's heat wave hotter, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College of London. She said that before human activities increased global temperatures, heat waves like this year's would have struck India once in about half a century.

"But now it is a much more common event — we can expect such high temperatures about once in every four years," she said.

India's vulnerability to extreme heat increased 15% from 1990 to 2019, according to a 2021 report by the medical journal The Lancet. It is among the top five countries where vulnerable people, like the old and the poor, have the highest exposure to heat. It and Brazil have the the highest heat-related mortality in the world, the report said.

Farm workers like Baldev Singh are among the most vulnerable. Singh, a farmer in Sangrur in northern India's Punjab state, watched his crop shrivel before his eyes as a usually cool spring quickly shifted to unrelenting heat. He lost about a fifth of his yield. Others lost more.

"I am afraid the worst is yet to come," Singh said.

ALSO READ:

• UAE: Why are food prices on the rise?

• UAE moves to protect consumers from food 
price hikes

Punjab is India's "grain bowl" and the government has encouraged cultivation of wheat and rice here since the 1960s. It is typically the biggest contributor to India's national reserves and the government had hoped to buy about a third of this year's stock from the region. But government assessments predict lower yields this year, and Devinder Sharma, an agriculture policy expert iin northern Chandigarh city, said he expected to get 25% less

China's agriculture minister, Tang Renjian, said last month that the winter wheat harvest was likely to be poor, hindered by flooding and by delays in planting.