As the southwest monsoon prepares to withdraw from India after completing its four-month journey, the sowing of kharif crops is also nearing its end.
In sum, the rains have by now been close to normal in most areas, barring parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, and Northwest India.
According to the agriculture ministry, barring paddy, pulses and oilseeds, the week-on-week rate of increase in sowing among other crops such as coarse cereals and cotton is slowing, signalling that farmers are now getting prepared for the next crop season rather than focusing their energies on the current one.
Around 105.7 million hectares is sown during the kharif season, of which it had been completed on 97.3 mha till Friday. Officials said 500,000-600,000 ha could remain unsown of the normal average by the end of this season. “The unsown area here does not mean that farmers would let it remain fallow. Instead, they would start planting early rabi crops, as late rains have been good,” a senior official said.
In many places, he said, the kharif sowing overlaps with early rabi. Hence, it is difficult to exactly assess till what time a crop hasn’t been sown on a particular piece of land. Nevertheless, the late resurgence in the monsoon has definitely helped in improving the coverage and narrowed the difference between the normal (average of the past five years) and actual sowing.
According to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the southwest monsoon is now expected to be near-normal, after making a slow start. “In our last forecast, we had said that rain in 2012 would be around 96 per cent of the Long Period Average and till date we have received rains which are around 90 per cent of the same, which means by the time the monsoon starts withdrawing, actual rainfall this year would be very close to our forecast,” said D S Pai, director of IMD’s Long Range Forecast division.
He said the southwest monsoon should start withdrawing from September 15-20 from the western parts of Rajasthan.
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Overall, the area under paddy this year is around 1.13 mha more than the normal. In oilseeds, sugarcane, cotton and jute, it is either more than the normal or just marginally down, as of last week.
“The big problem lies in coarse cereals and pulses. These two crops could see a drop in output. Although there is still time to sow, the chances are that it might not see a quantum jump in acreage from here onwards,” another official said.
Paddy, he said, was never a problem as grain stocks in the central pool were more than double the required quantity.
However, a drop in production of pulses and coarse cereals would pull up prices of both commodities in the retail market. It might increase the import dependence, mainly in the case of pulses. Already, analysts from some commodity research firms are expecting pulses’ import to climb to around four million tonnes this year from last year’s 2.5-3 mt, because of low output. “Unless pulses production rises significantly during the early rabi and later rabi seasons, prices would be firm,” an analyst said.
Similarly, in the case of coarse cereals, a drop in output could push up fodder prices and, subsequently, of milk. “The problem is less in the case of coarse cereals, as its shortage can be made up with grain but pulses and, to some extent, oilseeds, are a definite cause of worry,” said Ashok Gulati, chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices.
As for edible oils, those in the sector expect total import to rise to 9.5-10 mt in 2012-2013 (November-October), as against 9.3-9.5 mt this year. They said the biggest drop had been in groundnut and this could push up overall import.
Nevertheless, the loss could have been much bigger had the rains not revived from August. From a deficiency of almost 20 per cent, the southwest monsoon is now just nine per cent deficient.
The strong revival not only aided planting but also filled reservoirs, their levels rising from a low of around 16 per cent of the Full Reservoir Level in July to the current 65 per cent of storage capacity at this level. The government also got into the act and reconstituted an Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) on drought, which announced a Rs 2,000-crore relief package for drought-hit areas and also announced a subsidy on diesel.