India’s Monsoon Delay Unlikely to Hurt Sugar, Soybean Prospects

A delay in the progress of India’s monsoon towards the nation’s biggest sugar cane and cotton areas is unlikely to hurt crop prospects, industry officials said.

Rains, which have stalled since June 7, may not return in the next week, the India Meteorological Department said in a statement yesterday. The weather system hasn’t advanced further into the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, and the central state of Madhya Pradesh, the state-owned agency said.

Timely showers help increase yields of crops including rice, corn and soybeans that are planted after the onset of the rainy season on June 1. Lower sugar cane production this year turned the South Asian nation into a net importer of the sweetener for the first time since the 2005-06 season.

“The standing sugar cane crop is not at all affected by the delay,” Prakash Naiknavare, managing director of the Maharashtra State Cooperative Sugar Factories Federation Ltd., a producers’ group, said by phone from Mumbai. “Yields will be hurt only if the delay is beyond June.”

Inadequate rains in July last year lowered cane yields in Maharashtra, the nation’s biggest grower, causing sugar output to halve. The state expects output to rebound 20 percent to as much as 5 million metric tons in the season starting Oct. 1.

Most of Maharashtra’s cane crop has access to irrigation, Naiknavare said.

The delay won’t prompt soybean farmers in the Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra states, India’s biggest producers, to plant fewer acres to the oilseed or shift to another crop, Rajesh Agrawal, a spokesman for the Soybean Processors Association of India, said today in an interview.

“Soybean growers will still be alright with rains coming as late as the first week of July,” he said.

Animal Feed

India is Asia’s biggest supplier of soybean meal, an animal feed ingredient, and exports about 4 million tons annually. The nation is also the world’s biggest edible oil buyer after China, and meets almost half its demand from overseas purchases.

Peanuts and soybeans, sown during the rainy season, account for 60 percent of the nation’s total oilseed output. Planting begins in June and crops are harvested starting in September.

The June-September rainfall, which accounts for four-fifths of the nation’s annual rainfall, will be 96 percent of the so- called long-period average, recorded between 1941 and 1990, a level deemed near normal, the weather bureau said in April.

“The advance of southwest monsoon into different parts of the country is generally not a systematic and regular feature,” the bureau said yesterday. “After each wet spell, there comes a hiatus of about six to eight days in which the rainfall activity gets subdued, and northward advance is halted.”

source: bloomberg