When all else fails, Satveer Singh knows his family will manage if they have a sack of wheat flour in the kitchen to make rotis. Served hot and stuffed with sliced raw onion, the simple meal of Indian flatbreads keeps hunger at bay.
For now, the family can just about cover their needs - thanks in part to the ration they receive from a government programme that distributes food to 800 million people across India.
“It is not enough, but … on a bad day when money is tight, this wheat helps,” Singh said, gesturing towards the sack of grains lying in a corner of his ramshackle house in a slum area known as Gheja village outside the capital, New Delhi.
Ruminating over when to take the grains to be milled, he said supplies from the government programme were not always regular. A year or two ago, the family’s wheat ration was partly replaced by rice - for their taste, a poor replacement.
In 2022, hot weather arrived early in India’s major wheat growing regions, shrivelling crops and leading the government to ban wheat exports and reduce rations of the grain under the food distribution programme to protect domestic stocks.
A year later, history repeated itself. Even this year’s crop will be 6.25 per cent lower than a government estimate of 112 million metric tons, a leading industry body forecasts, setting the stage for the country to import for the first time in six years.
Climate change impacts - including harsher heat, drought and floods - pose a major emerging threat to food security in India and elsewhere, accelerating diverse efforts to introduce crops that are better able to withstand shifting conditions.
In India, the world’s second-biggest wheat producer, scientists in government research institutes and universities are racing to develop and distribute a broad range of climate-resilient wheat varieties that could prove vital to shoring up food security for its 1.4 billion people.
Traditionally, crop breeding programmes focused on boosting yield, “but that alone is no longer enough”, said Aditi Mukherji, director for climate change adaptation and mitigation at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a research partnership on food systems.
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First and foremost is that most of our farmers are resource poor with low levels of education… Most sow the seeds saved from their last crop and do not buy from the markets.
Gyanendra Pratap Singh, director, Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research
“Now, (we) need seeds that can withstand higher temperatures and are drought-resilient, or those that incorporate several climate-resilient features,” she said.
For farmers like Sukha Singh, who grows wheat on a 20-acre (eight-hectare) plot in the village of Ramba in northern Haryana state, supplies of new, hardier seeds could not arrive quickly enough after hefty climate-related losses in recent years.
Harvest losses
Sukha Singh lost more than 30 per cent of his wheat crop due to the heatwave that swept into northern India’s wheat belt in Haryana and neighbouring Punjab state in March 2022, before the normal hot season between April and June.
“Wheat is my main crop, any shock in the harvest puts a strain on my income that takes me at least two years to recover from,” he told Context on his farm, where this year’s crops were nearing harvest.
Studies have shown how temperature increases linked to climate change could reduce global wheat yields by up to 30 per cent by mid-century, potentially slashing exports from major producers such as India and driving up global food prices.
In India, yields could fall by more than 8 per cent by 2035 due to higher maximum temperatures and reduced rainfall, according to a government assessment. The decline could top 20 per cent by the end of the century.
