![]() ![]() India’s PDS provides subsidised food to 800 million people. ![]() Together, rice and wheat stocks with the FCI at the start of June were the lowest since 2017. India had produced a record 129.7 million metric tonnes of rice last year, also under La Niña, she said.īut India’s food supplies look less robust when the sharp fall in wheat production this year – which prompted the export ban – is taken into account. ![]() This should also help improve the country’s rice yield, said Kelly Goughary, a senior research analyst at Gro Intelligence, a US agriculture consulting group. La Niña conditions – cool ocean surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific – are expected to prevail from June through September, India’s monsoon season. Indeed, India’s rice stocks at the moment – 33 million metric tonnes – are the highest they’ve been at this time of the year since at least 2016, according to data from the Food Corporation of India (FCI), which procures food from farmers on behalf of the government for the public distribution system (PDS). “Why would India need such a ban?” Food supplies less robust “We haven’t received any signal from the government that it plans to impose any restrictions on exports,” Kaul told Al Jazeera. The last harvest was good, there are enough rice stocks in warehouses for the country’s vast subsidised food distribution system and the yield projections for the current season are promising, he said. “If India imposes serious restrictions on rice exports, it would be pretty devastating, especially for some of the poorest nations that depend on those imports,” Paul Dorosh, director of development strategy at the International Food Policy Research Institute, told Al Jazeera.įor the moment, there’s no need to worry about a potential export ban on rice, said Vinod Kaul, executive director of the All India Rice Exporters Association, the sector’s leading industry body. How India balances its domestic needs and its exports of rice could prove the difference between food security and hunger for millions of people around the world, they said. The value of the country’s rice exports in May rose by more than 10 percent compared with a year earlier, driven in large part by those fears, said analysts. India too, experts said, is expected to witness both increased yields and greater consumption – unlike with wheat, where the recent harvest was significantly worse than predicted.īut the ban on wheat exports has left international food markets preparing the possibility of similar restrictions by India. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that both the production and demand for rice will touch new records globally this year. Now, the food staple for more than half the planet could help India redeem itself after New Delhi’s ban on wheat exports last month sent shockwaves through the world at a time when the war in Ukraine has set off a global food crisis. China, which started importing rice from India only a few years ago, now counts the South Asian nation as its single biggest supplier. By far the world’s largest exporter of the cereal, India is the single biggest source of rice both for wealthy Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and for developing nations in West Africa like Ghana, Benin and Togo. It isn’t just Akwai’s family that comes together over Indian rice. “Because we’re all eating Indian rice, it feels like we’re sharing a meal, even though we’re so far apart,” the 23-year-old postgraduate student of commerce said. Bengaluru, India – When Bengaluru-based Ghanaian student Desmond Akwai misses his family in Accra, he gets on a video call with them over a meal, and they eat the exact same rice dish on both sides. ![]()
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