India Targets Record Wheat Harvest on Seeds, Sowing

By Thomas Kutty Abraham

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- India, the world's second-biggest wheat grower, aims to produce a record quantity of wheat for a second year by promoting the use of hybrid seeds and early sowing of the crop.

The government has set a target of 78.5 million metric tons, compared with an estimated 78.4 million tons this year, the farm ministry said on its Web site today. Wheat, sowed in October and harvested in March and April, accounts for more than 70 percent of the nation's winter-sown grain output.

A record harvest may help Prime Minister Manmohan Singh head off a food shortage that pushed inflation to a 16-year high last month. India will use 909,000 tons of wheat from its reserves to ensure domestic supplies are adequate during the festival season that starts next month, the government said last week.

Wheat yields have saturated in the biggest-growing regions because of a drop in soil fertility, the ministry said. Output can be increased in other regions using high quality seeds and completing sowing by the end of November, it said.

Farmers may increase wheat planting because of above-average rain, federal farm secretary T. Nanda Kumar said in an interview last month.

Monsoon, which accounts for four-fifths of the country's annual showers, was 11 percent above normal in the week ended Sept. 17, the India Meteorological Department said on its Web site. Rains since June 1 are two percent below a 50-year average, a level deemed normal, the agency said Sept. 18.

India aims to boost winter rice production 2.8 percent to 14 million tons from a year earlier, according to the farm ministry.

To contact the reporter on this story: Thomas Kutty Abraham in Mumbai at tabraham4@bloomberg.net.