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Bringing down the heavens
JUN 04 -
With less than a week for this year’s monsoon to begin, 49-year-old Bik Lal Shankadev, a farmer in Madhyapur Thimi, has been watching the distant clouds in the horizon every day. The clouds appear to be nearer one day, further the next, even as Shankadev looks at the 11-day-old rice seedlings ready to be transplanted in the next 10 days as soon as the first monsoon rains hit his fields.
“Scanty pre-monsoon rains in the past few days has raised my hopes of a good monsoon, unlike last year,” he says, “I have been working every day to protect the seedlings to transplant them next week, and for that the rains are a must.”
Shankadev owns 7 ropanies of land in Bhaktapur, an agriculture hub that supplies more than 50 percent of vegetables and other food crops to the Capital.
The delayed monsoon last year caused the seeds and the seedlings to bake and die. On top of that, unexpected rainfall and hailstorms during the harvesting season hit the farmers even harder.
In 2009, Nepal received less than 800 mm of rainfall—well below the normal 1,540 mm—making it the driest monsoon season in a decade. Agricultural produce nosedived, and the largest contributor to the Nepali GDP took the economy into a downward spiral.
The freak rains during the harvesting season were followed by a long winter drought that destroyed the winter crop of wheat. “Both of my major crops, wheat and paddy, were completely destroyed due to the drought last year. And the untimely rains during harvesting time took away the only source of my income.” Now, he says there is no alternative but to hope that the rains this year will be normal.
Shankadev’s story is not the exception. Manahara farmer Krishna Man Maharjan had to sow paddy seeds thrice last year due to the drought. “We had to re-plant the paddy seedlings twice waiting for the monsoons to come. But there was very little rain and we had to supply water to the fields through boring wells.”
Shankadev believes climatic patterns have been erratic for the last few years, marked by lesser rainfall and higher temperatures. In turn, most farmers in the area, including him, are changing their agricultural patterns and using more improved varieties of heat-tolerant seeds that need less water, using fertilisers, and constructing new irrigation canals joining nearby water sources.
Maharjan is hopeful this time as pre-monsoon rains are a sign that this year’s monsoon will be good. “We are hopeful that we will have a good yield this year,” he says.
Koju, a vegetable farmer from Manahara, blamed increasing urbanisation for depleting water sources. “Our ancestors were farmers on a much larger scale, and they never faced problems like this.” But for the last two years, variations in weather patterns and scarcity of water—both from the ground sources and the rains from the heaven—have forced the Koju family to change its agricultural practice. “Instead of rice that is a water-intensive crop, we now produce seasonal vegetables that need less water and give good yields in return.”
The monsoon accounts for 80 percent of the total rainfall in the country, and farmers rely on it disproportionately to water their major summer crops like paddy, maize, edible oil and pulses. Good monsoons and bumper harvests—or a bad one and dismal productivity—doesn’t just affect the farmers. As crop yields went down by an average of 30-35 percent last year, food prices shot up, and along with them, overall inflation galloped to double digits.
Weathermen have predicted that this year’s monsoon will be normal and earlier than the usual date of June 10, which would probably boost the yield of summer crops. This means farmers across the country will have a reason to cherish. And may not have to change their practices so drastically.
Posted on: 2010-06-05 08:54
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