Ozone pollution damages crops worth USD 1.29 billion in India

Over six million metric tonnes of wheat, rice, soybean and cotton crops worth USD 1.29 billion were destroyed in India due to surface ozone pollution, a US based organisation of geophysicists said today.
The study said that India could have fed 94 million people with the lost wheat and rice crops, about a third of the country's poor.
Sachin Ghude, an atmospheric scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, is the lead author of the new study.
There are about 270 million Indians who live in poverty.
Wheat, one of the country's major food sources, saw the largest loss by weight of the four crops studied in the new paper, with ozone pollution damaging 3.5 million metric tonnes (3.8 million US tonnes) of the crop in 2005.

Another major food source, rice, saw losses of 2.1 million metric tonnes (2.3 million US tonnes), according to the new study.

Cotton, one of India's major commercial crops, lost more than five per cent of its 3.3 million metric tonne (3.6 million US tonnes) annual output in 2005, costing the country USD 70 million, according to the new research.
The study, carried for the year 2005 and published in August 14 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of American Geophysical Union, looked at the agricultural effects in 2005 of high concentrations of ground-level ozone, a plant-damaging pollutant formed by emissions from vehicles, cooking stoves and other sources.

Able to acquire accurate crop production data for 2005, the study's authors chose it as a year representative of the effects of ozone damage over the first decade of the 21st century.
"The (amount of lost wheat and rice) are what surprised me," said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California San Diego and a co-author of the new study.
India's economic loss from ozone's harm to crops amounted to USD 1.29 billion in in 2005, the study found.
Declines in rice and wheat crops made up the majority of the loss, accounting for a combined USD 1.16 billion in losses, according to the new research.