Food Security – Chasing Tales

NB: (I seem to be writing these every post these days) I’m a climate… intersectionist, at best. If you’re a specialist and I’ve got something wrong, please do tell me. Basically my national security post got me interested in this.

Our food crisis under climate change is not one problem but several interacting ones: unstable monsoons, collapsing groundwater, nutrient-depleted soils, declining crop nutrition, pest expansion, and institutional systems built for a climate that no longer exists. It is possible to produce record harvests and still raise a malnourished generation, and India is getting dangerously close to discovering what that looks like.

The deeper problem is that India’s agricultural system still optimises primarily for calorie tonnage in a climate where nutrient density, ecological resilience, and hydrological sustainability increasingly matter more, because:

Elevated CO₂ and erratic monsoon → plants close their stomata to conserve water, so fewer minerals travel from soil to grain (the transpiration blockade), while depleted soils have less to offer in the first place → record harvests, but falling nutrition: more calories per plate, less zinc, less iron, less protein per gram → a population already short on protein eats food that is becoming shorter on protein with every degree of warming → food-insecure households face stunting and malnutrition → the same people are simultaneously being asked to do more physical work, not less: more pest management, more manual intervention as weather becomes erratic, malnourished women carrying nutrient-deficient pregnancies through harder seasons → faster physical burnout and growing intergenerational nutritional debt → greater humanitarian crises.

Why?

Because India’s agricultural calendar is built around the southwest monsoon (June to September). About half of our net sown area is rain-fed¹ ², and the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report³ ⁴ flagged increasing monsoon variability over South Asia⁵ as a high-confidence finding- this does not necessarily mean less total rain, but that the rain that does happen is more erratic in timing and more violent in intensity⁶: longer dry spells mid-season, more intense precipitation events at either end (it was literally hailing in Delhi a couple of days ago??!!⁷).

Secondly, heat stress is already biting into our agricultural yields even before water variability matters. For example, India lost an estimated 4-5%⁸ of its wheat yield, with losses of up to 10–25% in some districts⁹ ¹⁰, to the 2022 heat wave which arrived weeks ahead of historical norms and struck during grain-filling^{(the stage of grain development at which nutrients and carbohydrates are transferred into the developing grain}¹¹⁾ when the grain is most vulnerable¹².¹³ Without adaptation, several Indian crop‑model studies project that rain‑fed rice yields could fall by around 20% by mid‑century and approach halving by 2080 under high‑warming scenarios¹⁴, while even irrigated rice loses a few percentage points as heat stress intensifies. And that is before accounting for the groundwater that irrigates it running out.

Heat and water stress together could push food production in India down by 16.1% by 2050 in the worst-case scenario, against a global range of 6-14%, making India among the most exposed large economies on the planet.¹⁵ ¹⁶

The air
A landmark 2014 study published in Nature found that wheat grown under elevated CO₂ conditions contains 9.3% less zinc and 5.1% less iron than wheat grown under current atmospheric concentrations.¹⁷ Protein concentrations fall too, across C₃ grains and legumes, which is the category that includes wheat, rice, barley, and most pulses.¹⁷ A comprehensive 2025 meta-analysis synthesising data from approximately 59,000 samples across 43 food crops confirmed the pattern: elevated CO₂ produces food that is increasingly caloric and decreasingly nutritious¹⁸, with the most pronounced losses in zinc, iron, and protein. The researchers put it starkly: our food is becoming more calorie-rich, but less nourishing. The nutrient decline under elevated CO₂ is thought to result from multiple interacting mechanisms such as reduced transpiration, carbohydrate dilution (“more starch, same minerals”), altered nitrogen metabolism, reduced photorespiration effects in C₃ plants, and soil nutrient dynamics.¹⁹

For India, where rice and wheat together constitute the dietary backbone of over a billion people, this is not a theoretical concern. One modelling study projects that, by 2050, elevated CO₂ could reduce the effective global availability of protein, iron and zinc by roughly 15-20% compared with a world that had the same yields but today’s CO₂ levels, with South Asia among the hardest‑hit regions.²⁰ ²¹ A 2018 estimate put the human toll at 175 million people tipped into zinc deficiency and 122 million into protein deficiency by 2050, not because they eat less, but because the food they eat is less nutritious.²²

India already has 194 million undernourished people²³, 53.7% maternal anaemia²⁴, and the world’s highest child wasting rate²⁵. The CO₂ nutrition penalty lands on a population that has almost no buffer.

The soil
A February 2026 ICRIER report on soil health estimates that fewer than 5% of Indian soils now test high in available nitrogen and only around a fifth have adequate organic carbon.²⁶ Decades of intensive monocropping, overuse of urea-based fertilisers, and residue burning²⁷ have stripped soil of the microbial richness that makes nutrients bioavailable in the first place.²⁸ The fertiliser efficiency ratio (the kilograms of crop produced per kilogram of fertiliser applied) has collapsed: agronomists estimate that where farmers once got roughly 10 kilograms of grain per kilogram of fertiliser nutrient in the early Green Revolution years, recent ICAR data put the response at barely 9–11 kilograms, despite much higher application rates, with even lower returns in many intensively farmed districts.²⁹

Fertiliser
India’s agricultural soil now has too much nitrogen. This is because India’s subsidy regime makes urea artificially cheap, while phosphatic and potassic fertilisers are sold under a looser, nutrient‑based subsidy.³⁰ ³¹ The result is a skewed application pattern: against a recommended N:P:K ratio of about 4:2:1, India’s actual consumption is closer to 9-11:4:1 nationally, and far more distorted in some states, meaning fields are drenched in nitrogen and starved of other nutrients.³² ³³ Over time, this imbalance has produced “sick soils”: micronutrient deficiencies, rising salinity and alkalinity, and low organic carbon that together reduce fertiliser efficiency and yields.³⁴ ³⁵

The excess nitrogen does not vanish; it washes into groundwater and surface water as nitrate, where studies in Punjab, Bihar and elsewhere now find wells regularly exceeding WHO safety limits, with blue‑baby syndrome and cancer risks for rural families who drink that water, and when the fertiliser pours into river systems, they act like fertiliser for algae.³⁶ ³⁷ ³⁸Over time this creates eutrophication: thick algal blooms, oxygen‑starved stretches of water, mass fish kills, and sometimes toxin‑producing cyanobacteria that make surface water unsafe to drink.³⁹ ⁴⁰ ⁴¹

The water
Underneath that soil, India’s water table is in freefall.⁴² India is the world’s largest consumer of groundwater for agriculture, with groundwater accounting for 60% of all irrigation supplies.⁴³ A study published estimated that groundwater depletion could reduce crop production by up to 20% nationally, and by up to 68% in regions with the lowest projected future groundwater availability.⁴⁴ A 2024 IIT Gandhinagar study found that weakening summer monsoons, itself a consequence of climate change, are accelerating this depletion.⁴⁵ The warming climate is simultaneously drying the monsoon that recharges our aquifers and increasing the evaporative demand that empties it. By 2080, the rate of groundwater depletion could triple if current trends hold.⁴⁶

Dairy and livestock
India’s nutrition system does not run on crops alone. A significant share of protein, fat, and micronutrient intake comes from milk and other animal-sourced foods, produced largely by smallholder households rather than industrial systems.⁴⁷ ⁴⁸ But this too sits under climate stress. Heatwaves reduce milk yield and fertility in cattle and buffalo, while increasing disease susceptibility and mortality risk.⁴⁹ ⁵⁰ At the same time, fodder availability is becoming more erratic as monsoons destabilise and common grazing lands degrade, forcing farmers to rely on more expensive or lower-quality feed.⁴⁷ ⁵¹ The result is a quiet squeeze: rising input costs, falling productivity per animal in extreme years, and a nutrition buffer that becomes less reliable exactly when crop-based nutrition is also deteriorating.⁵²

The Sea
India is the world’s third-largest fish producer, and for hundreds of millions of coastal and riverine families, fish is the primary protein source.⁵³ ⁵⁴ This source of food is also under stress. The Bay of Bengal is warming, and a 2025 study found that both extreme and weak monsoon conditions, both of which climate change makes more likely, reduce surface food availability for marine life by around half in some simulations, thus disrupting the plankton base that the entire food chain runs on.⁵⁵ ⁵⁶ Inland, erratic monsoons dry out ponds and silt up rivers, destroying the small indigenous fish species that rural families harvest.⁵⁴

The biology⁵⁷ ⁵⁸
There is a biological dimension to this that rarely makes it into climate or food security writing: women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. Every oocyte is already present at birth, formed inside the mother’s uterus before the daughter herself is born. The nutritional environment of the womb may influence those developing oocytes at a molecular level.⁵⁹ ⁶⁰ Researchers studying developmental and epigenetic effects increasingly suspect that severe nutritional stress during pregnancy can alter patterns of gene regulation in ways that may extend across generations.⁶¹ So, a malnourished pregnant woman does not only affect her child’s development. Emerging evidence suggests some nutritional stresses may also influence gene regulation across multiple generations through the oocytes already forming in her developing fetus.⁶²

India’s 57% anaemia rate for women of ages 15-49 is not⁶³, therefore, only a present-tense health crisis, but a multi-generational nutritional debt, and children bear the next wave. India’s approximately 37 million⁶⁴ stunted children will be the workforce of 2040–2050 with permanently reduced cognitive and physical capacity from the malnutrition of their first thousand days. The climate disruption is projected to peak in the same window.⁶⁵ These are not separate problems.

Pestilence
As temperatures rise, the geographic ranges of many insect pests are shifting poleward at rates measured in the tens of kilometres per decade⁶⁶ ⁶⁷, with new climate envelopes allowing species to colonise regions where they previously could not overwinter. In practical terms for India, this means crops in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, including wheat, rice, vegetables, are increasingly exposed to pests and pathogens for which they have evolved no resistance.⁶⁸ ⁶⁹

The consequences are already visible on the ground. Farmers across Maharashtra report that pink bollworm, absent for nearly 12 years, has returned, with repeated pesticide applications the only available response.⁷⁰ ⁷¹ Meanwhile warming temperatures in Rajasthan have produced up to ten pest attack events in a single year, up from historical norms.⁷² Roughly speaking, each additional degree of warming allows many insect pests to shift their ranges by hundreds of kilometres polewards and tens of metres uphill.⁶⁷ For crops bred to local pest profiles over centuries, that is a radically destabilised environment.

The response of farmers in a system with weak extension services⁷³^{(systems that bridge the gap between scientific research and farmers, providing training, technical advice, and information}⁷⁴⁾ and limited credit access⁷⁵^{(because without access to easy credit, poorer farmers are unable to fund access to the knowledge and methods of pest control)} is almost always the same: more pesticide. This adds cost, further degrades soil microbial life, and to round everything off, impairs the very biodiversity in soil and water systems that would otherwise offer natural pest suppression.⁷⁶ ⁷⁷ It is also why traditional and heritage varieties of seeds and plants, which carry broader genetic resistance shaped by long regional exposure, become more valuable as pest ranges shift.⁷⁸

Pollinators
A significant share of the plant food Indians need more of, including vegetables, fruits, oilseeds, and pulses, depends on pollinators to set seed.⁷⁹ ⁸⁰ Climate change disrupts this through what ecologists call ‘phenological mismatch’⁸¹: as temperatures rise, plants flower earlier while pollinator life cycles shift at a different rate, so the flowering window and the pollinator activity window stop reliably overlapping. A study published in 2025, drawing on 120 years of specimen records, documented a significant increase in local extinction risk for flowering plants driven precisely by this kind of bee-flower mismatch.⁸² ⁸³

Concrete
A study using satellite data found that from 2001 to 2010⁸⁴, agricultural land lost to urbanisation was concentrated in districts with high agricultural suitability.⁸⁵ Over the two decades from 1991 to 2011, roughly 1.59 million hectares of prime farmland was converted to non-agricultural use.⁸⁶ ⁸⁷

As that peri-urban agricultural belt disappears, food has to travel further, which makes India’s chronically underdeveloped cold chain more critical and more energy-intensive.⁸⁸ ⁸⁹ Agriculture gets pushed onto marginal land such as hillsides, arid zones, or areas with thin soils, which are, almost by definition, the land most vulnerable to the climate shocks described everywhere else in this piece.⁸⁵ ⁹⁰ ⁹¹

Ownership gap⁹² ⁹³ ⁹⁴ ⁹⁵
As farming becomes less viable men migrate to cities for other work. What remains is increasingly managed by women. Around 80% of rural women in India are now engaged in agriculture; they handle roughly 70% of all farm tasks. However, just 11-12% of agricultural landholdings were registered in women’s names. Without a land title, you are not, legally, a farmer in India: which means no PM-KISAN payments⁹⁶, no crop insurance, no institutional credit, no access to most government agricultural schemes.

Cold Chains– I’ll be writing on this soon. Also, India’s future food resilience depends partly on reliable electricity expansion, because refrigeration⁹⁷, irrigation pumping⁹⁸, fertiliser production⁹⁹, and transport¹⁰⁰ are all energy-intensive.

One bright spot
India’s community seed banks now collectively steward at least 887 traditional varieties across 71 crop species, documented across 15 states in a 2025 CSE report.¹⁰¹ ¹⁰² These varieties are locally adapted, which means they have been shaped over centuries by the specific soils, monsoon patterns, and pests of their regions. Many are more drought-tolerant, flood-resilient, and nutritionally dense than their commercial replacements.¹⁰³

India has the world’s largest formal gene repository, the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources.¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰⁵ However, formal conservation and living seed systems are not substitutes for each other. The first preserves genetic material. The second keeps knowledge, practice, and biodiversity alive in farming communities.¹⁰⁶

What we can do
The solutions are not mysterious, if even I can suggest them.

Fix the cold chain. India has roughly 8,000 cold storage facilities¹⁰⁷, most of which store potatoes. Decentralised solar cold storage at the Farmer Producer Organisation level would reduce post-harvest losses, currently between 30–40% for perishables¹⁰⁸, and stabilise supply in the face of erratic weather.
MSP reform toward climate-resilient crops.¹⁰⁹ Millets, pulses, and oilseeds are might be more drought-tolerant, more nutritionally diverse, and less susceptible to CO₂-driven nutrient dilution than rice and wheat.¹¹⁰ Moving minimum support prices to signal farmers toward these crops is the only thing that moves production at scale. Promotional campaigns without price signals don’t work.
Fund and legally empower community seed banks. The CSE report’s estimate of 887 traditional varieties across community banks is a fraction of what has already been lost. Seed sovereignty is food sovereignty. Legal recognition, technical support, and sustained funding for community seed banks, including unrestricted rights for farmers to save, exchange, and sell traditional varieties, is one of the highest-return investments India can make in long-run food resilience.
Recognise women as farmers by activity, not land title. Shift the legal definition from landowner to tiller (which is politically highly improbable of course, but well… do something to improve the actual worker’s access to funds and education).
Reform fertiliser subsidies toward soil health. The current subsidy architecture, which gives 80%+ subsidies to urea while leaving phosphorus and potassium significantly less supported, has produced the soil crisis India now has. Rebalancing toward nutrient-balanced fertilizers, funding soil health cards, and incentivising organic matter restoration is not optional. It is the prerequisite for everything else.
Integrate nutrition tracking into agricultural statistics. A rice crop that produces 20% fewer tonnes at 10% lower protein content per grain is a double failure, but it shows up as one number in production statistics. Climate adaptation schemes, crop insurance frameworks, and agricultural research all need to track nutrient density alongside yield.

What makes this moment so consequential is not any single pressure, but their convergence: Soil that is already depleted produces crops that are already less nutritious. Those crops are grown in a system structurally dependent on groundwater that is already running out. The monsoon that was supposed to recharge that groundwater is becoming more violent and less predictable. And rising CO₂ is simultaneously reducing the nutritional content of the crops that do grow. Each layer of stress compounds the others, and into that situation, add: crops that become less nutritious as CO₂ rises, yields that fall under heat and monsoon stress, and a dairy system that loses productivity precisely as temperatures climb.

For India, feeding people must come before reducing agricultural emissions, but ignoring emissions is not cost-free. Every degree of warming tightens the constraint a little further. India’s record food grain production figures and its catastrophic localised harvest failures have begun to coexist in the same season- the 2025 October monsoon that damaged crops across Maharashtra and Karnataka in the same year production statistics showed record outputs.¹¹¹ That coexistence will become more common, and more violent.

India is obsessed with “Record Production” (the headline numbers). But if those tonnes of grain are nutritionally hollow (due to the CO₂ penalty) and the soil is just a medium for urea-driven growth, we are effectively inflating our food stats. We are producing more food but less nourishment.

We cannot grow our way out of this climate crisis. But we can build a food system that is robust enough to feed its people through the disruption ahead. The alternative is to find out, a generation from now, in the health data of children not yet born, what it cost not to have done so.

Sources

(I cannot figure out where the extras are, so here are four more sources than what I can find in my article above)

Tag: Food Security

Feeding India through the oncoming climate catastrophe

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