India may face serious food inflation as the south-west monsoon is showing fresh signs of a poor delivery. While the government is trying to ready some backup plans, the overall impact on agriculture if monsoon trips may be disastrous.
The heightened worries regarding monsoon came after Australia’s weather bureau warned that the development of an El-Nino weather pattern was increasing. The bureau said that currently it was a medium-strength event, but it could still take months for it to be officially declared.
El-Nino, literally meaning ‘little boy’ in Spanish, is a whether phenomenon which leads to rising temperature in the eastern Pacific Ocean and can have significant conduct on whether events like monsoon. It is generally associated with droughts in Asian and Australian regions and wetter-than-normal weather in parts of South America.
The last severe El Nino occurred in 1998, at the height of the South-Asian financial crises and killed over 2,000 people along with causing billions of dollars worth of damage to crops and infrastructure Asia and Australia.
The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) is hoping that the severing of the El-Nino does no happen too fast to impact Indian monsoon. While the department forecasted 93% rains for Indian from the monsoon, it presumed that by the time El-Nino will develop to its full strength, Indian monsoon period would have been over.
However, a faster development of El-Nino, as warned by Australian whether bureau may result in serious shortfall in rains in India, particularly in the northern regions like Punjab, Haryana and UP, etc. This will certainly hit the crop production, leading to further increase in food inflation which is already hovering around the 10% mark.