India’s wheat harvest will exceed 110 million tons for the first time

India can applaud a hallmark in national food production: in 2023, the harvest of wheat—India’s second most important food crop—will surpass 110 million tons for the first time.

This maintains India as the world’s number-two wheat producer after China, as has been the case since the early 2000s. It also extends the wheat productivity jumpstart that begun in the Green Revolution—the modernization of India’s agriculture during the 1960s-70s that allowed the country to put behind it the recurrent grain shortages and extreme hunger of preceding decades.

“Newer and superior wheat varieties in India continually provide higher yields and genetic resistance to the rusts and other deadly diseases,” said Distinguished Scientist Emeritus at CIMMYT, Ravi Singh. “More than 90 percent of spring bread wheat varieties released in South Asia in the last three decades carry CIMMYT breeding contributions for those or other valued traits, selected directly from the Center’s international yield trials and nurseries or developed locally using CIMMYT parents.”

Wheat grain yield in Indian farmers’ fields rose yearly by more than 1.8 percent—some 54 kilograms per hectare—in the last decade, a remarkable achievement and significantly above the global average of 1.3 percent. New and better wheat varieties also reach farmers much sooner, due to better policies and strategies that speed seed multiplication, along with greater involvement of private seed producers.

“The emergence of Ug99 stem rust disease from eastern Africa in the early 2000s and its ability to overcome the genetic resistance of older varieties drove major global and national initiatives to quickly spread the seed of newer, resistant wheat and to encourage farmers to grow it,” Singh explained. “This both protected their crops and delivered breeding gains for yield and climate resilience.”

CIMMYT has recently adopted an accelerated breeding approach that has reduced the breeding cycle to three years and is expected to fast-track genetic gains in breeding populations and hasten delivery of improvements to farmers. The scheme builds on strong field selection and testing in Mexico, integrates genomic selection, and features expanded yield assays with partner institutions. To stimulate adoption of newer varieties, the Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research (IIWBR, of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, ICAR) operates a seed portal that offers farmers advanced booking for seed of recently released and other wheat varieties.

Private providers constitute another key seed source. In particular, small-scale seed producers linked to the IIWBR/ICAR network have found a profitable business in multiplying and marketing new wheat seed, thus supporting the replacement of older, less productive or disease susceptible varieties.

Tags: wheat, India, crop forecast