$5bn ozone-related wheat loss: Study

Vijay Mohan

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 29

Pegging crop yield loss due to surface ozone at $5 billion for wheat and $1.5 billion for rice, a joint study carried out by scientists from India and Germany has called for an urgent need to conduct strategic ozone observations over agricultural fields and develop a regional emission database to support policy-making in India.

“Our estimates reveal a nationwide relative yield loss of about 21 per cent for wheat and 6 per cent for rice. We also estimate loss of about 16 per cent for wheat and 11 per cent for rice in the states of Punjab and Haryana,” the study states. Their findings, the study’s authors claim, are “substantially higher” than earlier such researches.

Elevated ozone concentrations near the surface significantly reduce crop yields, which is crucial as the country’s economy and the food security for over a billion people depends strongly on the agricultural productivity. The wheat production in India is expected to cross 100 million tonnes in 2019.

Titled Revisiting the Crop Yield Loss in India Attributable to Ozone, the study, undertaken by scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, ISRO’s Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, and Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Germany, has been published in the recent issue of Atmospheric Environment, a Netherland-based scientific journal.

The authors say the total crop production losses are estimated to be 22 million tonnes for wheat and 6.5 million tonnes for rice.