Commentary: India’s rice export ban will damage its claim to lead the Global South

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Indian bureaucrats like to claim – including at the World Trade Organization – that their restrictive trade policies are meant to protect our millions of subsistence farmers. 

In practice, however, farmers are the last thing on policymakers’ minds. If agricultural income was the government’s number-one priority, it would not shut down exports just as prices are rising and farmers have an opportunity to make a rare profit.

DECISIONS HAVE GLOBAL RAMIFICATIONS

If India is to take on a leading role in the world, it must understand that its decisions have global ramifications. Even in richer countries such as the US, consumers – many from the Indian diaspora – have stampeded supermarkets in attempts to hoard various Indian varieties of rice.

Indian policymakers have their defence ready against such complaints. They will point out that the ban doesn’t extend to the most popular Indian variant, basmati. This will be little consolation to Indians abroad, particularly those from South India, who prefer shorter-grain varieties.

They could also, with perfect truth, point out that in spite of the ban on exports announced last year, India actually shipped out almost twice as much wheat during the summer of 2022 as it had the previous year. This wasn’t because of leakages in the system. Partly, it was because contracts signed before the ban were still fulfilled.

But it was also because other governments could lobby Indian officials to make exceptions for specific wheat shipments. A similar system will be put into place for rice.

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Commentary: Tourists are flocking to heatwave zones to experience 56°C temperatures. Why?

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Perhaps they might want to reflect on the fact that Earth has already warmed by around 1.1 to 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.

Many may not realise that even if worldwide fossil fuel combustion was immediately eliminated, the roughly 0.5 degrees Celsius cooling contribution of atmospheric aerosols – also the result of existing fossil fuel combustion – would rapidly dissipate through gravitational settling and precipitation scavenging of these aerosols.

This would cause the Earth to warm rapidly to around 1.6 to 1.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The warming does not end there, as the planet is on course to go well above 2 degrees Celsius in the decades ahead once reduced aerosol cooling, permafrost melt and other greenhouse gases are taken into account.

I suspect that these travellers are unaware that when these other pesky greenhouse gases are included, the net radiative effect is equivalent to 523 ppm CO2e, of which only 417 ppm is from CO2 alone.

THE PARIS AGREEMENT

Governments worldwide have signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement committing nations to collectively limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The Paris Agreement might appear promising. But the reality is that the 1.5 degrees Celsius guardrail cannot be met, and that socioeconomic inertia prevents us from even staying below the 2 degrees Celsius threshold. Even if every country met its promised emissions reductions, global mean temperatures would still soar past 2 degrees Celsius.

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