After a fifth straight year of bumper rabi harvest through 2013-14, winter sowing has dropped 4.6% until Friday from a year before despite an improvement in the pace of sowing in December, showed the latest farm ministry data.
This has reinforced fears, also expressed by agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh last week, that winter harvest in 2014-15 could be lower than a year before.
“There was a 13% drop in monsoon rains (from the normal levels). It is natural that there would be some impact on rabi crops, but it will not be significant,” Singh had said. The government’s timely measures — including contingency plans and diesel subsidies for irrigation in affected areas — mitigated the impact of erratic monsoon, he had said.
Although the area under wheat, the most important winter-sown crop, has declined marginally until Friday, pulses sowing has dropped by 10.2%.
The planting of oilseeds has dipped 6.8% and cereal areas have gone down 8.9%. Total area under winter crops has dropped to 55.28 million hectares until Friday, compared with 57.96 million hectares in the same period of 2013-14, according to the farm ministry data.
Winter planting usually starts around mid-September and is mostly over by mid-January.
A drop in acreage and consequent fall in farm production is expected to affect overall economic growth. This is because buoyed by a 4.7% expansion in the farm and allied sectors, remarkable by their standards and compared with 1.4% a year before, the overall economy grew 4.7% in 2013-14 even though industrial growth tattered. Already, kharif grain output has been estimated to drop 7% in 2014-15, mainly due to erratic rainfall earlier this year, and the government had been pinning hopes on yet another year of bumper rabi harvest to offset the losses in summer production.
While the mid-year review is targeting 5.5% economic growth for 2014-15, the economic survey has forecast it at 5.4-5.9%, although it has warned that weak monsoon rains could keep growth closer to 5.4%.
Although global farm commodity prices have eased significantly, any plunge in pulses and oilseed planting raises the country’s reliance on imports, which may not augur well in times of a currency devaluation. India, a key vegetable oils buyer, imports around half of its annual requirement of cooking oils and one-fifth of pulse needs.
Consumer price inflation dropped to 4.4% in November, its lowest since the relevant index was introduced in January 2012, and wholesale price inflation hit zero in November, the meanest since July 2009. However, analysts said once the base effect wears off from November-December, food inflation may inch up.