In the past five years, rain-related events hurting India’s marginal farmers more significantly than other adverse weather conditions, particularly extreme heat, according to the State of Marginal Farmers of India 2024 report published on Friday.

The report, brought out by the research and advocacy group Forum of Enterprises for Equitable Development and the Development Intelligence Unit, relies on the Indian government’s definition of a marginal farmer as someone who conducts agricultural activities on less than one hectare of agricultural land, either as a proprietor, sharecropper or tenant.

For its 2024 report, the Development Intelligence Unit and the Forum of Enterprises for Equitable Development interviewed 6,615 marginal farmers across 21 states by telephone about the impact of nine different extreme weather events on their crops in the past five years.

These are: early withdrawal or delayed arrival of the monsoon, floods, cyclones, droughts or less than-normal-rainfall, heatwaves, rising daytime temperatures, prolonged summers, prolonged winters and an increase in the number of unseasonal rainy days.

Of the 6,615 respondents, 40.9% said that their villages had been hurt by droughts or less than-normal-rainfall, 32.6% said they were impacted by excessive or unseasonal rains, 23.6% said their villages experienced early withdrawal or delayed arrival of the monsoon and 17.5% saw their villages flood.

Thirteen percent of the respondents said that their villages had been hit by a cyclone at least once in the last five years.

Prolonged winters impacted 12.3% of the respondents, while 11.5% of them experienced prolonged summers. A total of 10.3% of the respondents saw above-normal daytime temperatures and 7.7% experienced extreme heatwave.

“Most farmers reported that their village had witnessed extreme weather events once or twice in the past five years,” said the report. “The fact that over one in three marginal farmers had to cope with extreme weather events at least twice in a period of five years means their earning capacity from agriculture has been seriously constrained.”

In most cases, “the damage appears to have been caused by rainfall-related events”, the report said.

While farmers seemed to have adapted to extreme temperatures, the most significant impact on them has been due to excessive or unseasonal rains, prolonged winter conditions, droughts and floods.

Over 40% of the marginal farmers reported either no or minor crop loss due to heat-related weather events while over 50% said that half or more of their standing crops were lost due to rain-related weather events.

Only 10% of the farmers consistently reported no crop loss due to extreme weather.

The research and advocacy organisation also checked if farmers had to supplement or change their current livelihood due to crop loss. The survey found that of the 5,263 farmers whose villages were affected by adverse weather, 83% had pursued an alternate means livelihood.

Of the total farmers interviewed, 83.1% were cultivating their own land while the rest were sharecroppers. A sharecropper is a tenant farmer who cultivates either for a fixed rent or in return for a share of the crops produced.

The All India Report on Agriculture Census 2015-’16 had found that marginal farmers, who comprised 65.4% of all farmers in India at the time, owned only 24% of the country’s total cultivable land.

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