Swapping rice for alternative cereals can reduce climate-associated production losses and increase farmer incomes in India

By Dongyang Wei, Leslie Castro, Ashwini Chhatre, Marta Tuninetti, Kyle Davis
Nature Communications | March 2025

DOI

10.1038/s41467-025-57420-6

Citation

Wei, Dongyang., Castro, Leslie., Chhatre, Ashwini., Tuninetti, Marta., Davis, Kyle. Swapping rice for alternative cereals can reduce climate-associated production losses and increase farmer incomes in India Nature Communications 10.1038/s41467-025-57420-6.

Nature Communications, 2025

Abstract

The rising homogeneity of global crop supply has increased vulnerability to climatic and economic disruptions. While substantial work has examined yield variations in relation to climate variability, little is known about the influence of harvested area on production stability. To investigate this, we take the example of monsoon cereal production in India, which has steadily shifted towards climate-sensitive rice and away from alternative cereals (finger millet, maize, pearl millet, and sorghum). We find that variations in harvested area are significantly associated with current and past price fluctuations for all cereals except rice. This suggests that farmer decisions based on economic factors may exercise great influence in determining variations in harvested area. We also show that optimized allocations of harvested area can reduce climate-induced production loss by 11% or improve farmer net profit by 11% while maintaining calorie production and cropland area. Such improvements would be possible by reducing harvested areas dedicated to rice and increasing areas allocated to alternative cereals. Our findings show that harvested area allocations can be influenced by price and that strategies which utilize harvested area to address cereal yield fluctuations and improve farm profits could be an important complement to ongoing efforts to improve alternative cereal yields and stabilize crop production.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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Ashwini Chhatre