India's Rains to Sustain Wheat, Rice, Easing Shortage

India's annual monsoon rains will likely be sufficient this year for farmers to plant rice, wheat and oilseeds, helping the government head off a food shortage that has stoked inflation to a three-year high.

``Rains are likely to be near normal this year,'' Kapil Sibal, minister for science and technology, said in a news conference in New Delhi today. Rains, starting in the last week of May, will be 99 percent of the average between 1941 and 1990 with a margin for error of plus or minus 5 percent, he said.

India, the second-biggest producer of rice and wheat, depends on the four-month monsoon to water its farms as three- fifths of the nation's arable land isn't irrigated. Increased crops may not be enough to damp inflation, which central bank Governor Yaga Venugopal Reddy said is at an unacceptable level.

``The rains this year are critical for India and the world too,'' said Sumita Kale, chief economist at Indicus Analytics, a research group that advises the World Bank and Harvard University. ``Reddy is under pressure to be seen to be doing something, even though inflation is stoked by food and oil.''

Lower agriculture production in India will force Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government to rely on imports to feed the country's 1.1 billion people. That could further strain global food stocks and drive international prices that have caused social unrest in 33 countries from Mexico to Yemen.