“Vilas Dinkar Mukane lives halfway around the world from the corn farmers of Iowa,†Vikas Bajaj wrote in The New York Times, “but the Indian sharecropper is at risk of losing his livelihood for the same reason: not enough rain.â€
“With the nourishing downpours of the annual monsoon season down an average of 12 percent across India and much more in some regions, farmers in this village about 250 miles east of Mumbai are on the brink of disaster,†he wrote.
Drought has devastated crops around the world this year, including corn and soybeans in the United States, wheat in Russia and Australia and soybeans in Brazil and Argentina. This has con tributed to a 6 percent rise in global food prices from June to July, according to United Nations data.
India is experiencing its fourth drought in a dozen years, raising concerns about the reliability of the country's primary source of fresh water, the monsoon rains that typically fall from June to October.
Some scientists warn that such calamities are part of a trend that is likely to intensify in the coming decades because of climate changes caused by the human release of greenhouse gases.
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