Newly planted rice saplings have been underwater since July after torrential rain battered northern India, with landslides and flash floods sweeping through the region.
Last month, India, which is the world’s largest exporter of rice, announced a ban on exporting non-basmati white rice in a bid to calm rising prices at home and ensure food security. India then followed with more restrictions on its rice exports, including a 20% duty on exports of parboiled rice.
The move has triggered fears of global food inflation, hurt the livelihoods of some farmers and prompted several rice-dependent countries to seek urgent exemptions from the ban.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The move has triggered fears of global food inflation, hurt the livelihoods of some farmers and prompted several rice-dependent countries to seek urgent exemptions from the ban.
Economists say the ban is just the latest move to disrupt global food supplies, which has suffered from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as weather events such as El Niño.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has encouraged India to remove the restrictions, with the organization’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, telling reporters last month that it was “likely to exacerbate” the uncertainty of food inflation.
Indian farmers account for nearly half of the country’s workforce, according to government data, with rice paddy mainly cultivated in central, southern, and some northern states.
The World Meteorological Organization last month warned that governments must prepare for more extreme weather events and record temperatures, as it declared the onset of the warming phenomenon El Niño.
El Niño is a natural climate pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that brings warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures and has a major influence on weather across the globe, affecting billions of people.
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