India's Smog Damages Enough Crops to Feed 94 Million: Study

 Published September 9,2014

Millions of tons of India's major crops were lost in 2005, worth more than $1 billion and enough to feed tens of millions of people living below the poverty line, all because of one thing: ozone pollution. That was the finding from a study published in August in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, which looked at the effects of high concentrations of ground-level ozone on India's agricultural production. The scientists who conducted the study, titled "Reductions in India's Crop Yield Due to Ozone," chose 2005 both because the necessary data on the nation's crop production were available for that year and because it provides a window into the impacts of ozone pollution so far in the 21st century.

What did they find? That ozone -- which "can cause leaf damage that stifles plant growth, injuring and killing vegetation," the American Geophysical Union explains -- was responsible for about 6.7 million tons of lost wheat, rice, soybean and cotton crops in 2005. Among those, wheat and rice suffered some of the heaviest losses, as ozone pollution killed off about 3.8 million tons of wheat and 2.3 million tons of rice that year. “The (amount of lost wheat and rice) are what surprised me,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, one of the study's co-authors and a professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

These crop losses alone could feed some 94 million people in India, or about one-third of its population living in poverty, said Sachin Gunde, the study's lead author and an atmospheric scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, in a news release. Ozone is created in the atmosphere from chemicals released from car tailpipes, industrial smokestacks and many other sources, notes the American Lung Association. When these pollutants are released into the atmosphere and come in contact with sunlight, they combine to create ozone. India's ozone smog pollution has become dramatically worse in recent decades. Though the country put air quality standards in place back in the 1980s, the AGU notes, its biggest cities now rival China's as the most polluted in the world. In 2003, India had about 50 million vehicles on its roads, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation. By 2013, that number had mushroomed to 130 million.

http://www.wunderground.com/news/india-smog-crops-94-million-20140908