It’s not just the Centre’s rice quota cut – which rocked Parliament last week – that will upset Kerala’s food bowl this season. The north west monsoon too is in a mood to keep the rice granaries bare, ravaging incessant rain on the second round of cultivation in the state’s key paddy-growing areas.

More than 50% of the paddy under cultivation in Kuttanad is in jeopardy, sources told FE. About 46,000 tonne are lying around exposed to the elements in various stages of harvesting and post-harvesting.

Rain-fed humidity could breed fungal spores on even harvested paddy. Mills tend to reject such suspect-quality paddy on fears of churning out rice unfit for human consumption.

The Kerala government’s main grocery arm Supplyco had been committed to procuring 80,000 tonne of paddy from Kuttanad farmers. Of this, only 34,000 tonne have been procured, a Supplyco spokesman revealed.

This season, Kuttanad had gone for its second leg of paddy crop in over 9,000 hectare. Following a state-vs-mills bargaining dispute, out of the usual 40-odd rice mills building up stocks from Kuttanad, only 15 are in the procurement drill this time.

The jolt from excessive rain comes when the state is already short of rice. Upto March 2007 the Centre had earmarked as much as 113,420 tonne of rice every month for distribution to APL (above poverty line) cardholders. This quota was trimmed to 21,334 tonne from April 2007 and further to 17,056 tonne from April 2008, “without mentioning reasons”, says state food minister C Divakaran. The quota has completely stopped since September this year.

Also, rice production in Kerala is tapering down, yielding just 6.3 lakh tonne last year. The state produced only about 15% of its requirement in 2008, compared to 45% in 1951.

The state does not have captive paddy farmers with cultivation in huge tracts of land. Out of the 3 lakh paddy farmers, a majority are marginal farmers. The average land holding of a paddy farmer (.33 ha) is one-fifth that of the national average.

At the same time, wage-driven production costs for paddy is among the highest in the country. Paddy cultivation cost in Kerala is as exacting as Rs 25,000 per hectare. Farmers say the profit per five acre is less than Rs 50 per day.

Following alarm bells from the State Planning Board, the Kerala government had embarked on a Rs 100-crore paddy production doubling programme this year.

The full irony strikes only when one knows that north west monsoon is only a second rain feeder for the Indian peninsula. Where Kerala gets an average annual rainfall of 2,863.7 mm, as much as an average 1964.7 mm comes from the south west monsoon that arrives in June. It is the north west monsoon, the relatively scarce-supplier of irrigation, which has emerged the feared grain-dampener during the harvest season.