Warm Winter May Cut Wheat Output for Second Straight Year
New Delhi: India’s wheat output is expected to fall for a second straight year in 2016 after a series of bumper harvests since 2007 due to an unusually warm winter in central and northern India.
India, the world’s second-biggest wheat producer, will likely weather the storm as it is sitting on surplus stocks. But lower wheat output will deepen the crisis in the countryside where adverse weather conditions have been a bane of late.
Despite last year’s lower output, the crisis has remained confined to farms but any further damage to the crop could start pinching the public if state stocks get drawn down.
In 2015 untimely hail and rains during harvest cut output to 88.94 million tonnes from 91.50 million tonnes a year earlier.
“We are observing higher than normal temperatures in most parts of the country, including central and northern India, where wheat is the main crop,” Indu Sharma, chief of state-run Directorate of Wheat Research, told Reuters by phone from the northern city of Karnal, a wheat belt.
If higher temperatures are going to imperil the crop yield, yellow pest infestation has come as a double whammy.
Read full article: NDTV
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