*MUMBAI: *With monsoon setting firm in the Indian subcontinent, the further advancement towards the State of Maharashtra is believed to bring-in fresh hopes for improved crop situation for sugar for the next season.
India's southwest monsoon is inching ahead towards key sugarcane growing areas in India. The showers are expected in the next two to three days. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Tuesday had maintained that fairly widespread rainfall would occur over parts of Maharashtra, the country's largest sugar producing state, and over the southern state of Karnataka, which is the third-largest sugar producer in the country. Sugarcane yield in India had witnessed a steep fall this year pushing up local and global price to record highs. Isolated heavy rainfall is likely to occur over Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and the western part of Uttar Pradesh in the next 24 hours. The June-September monsoon is crucial as it brings most of the rains in India, where about 60% of the farmlands are rain-fed. Sowing of summer-season crops, which includes rice, sugarcane, soybean and cotton, starts with the onset of the monsoon. At the onset of the good monsoon, the farmers are anticipating higher cane output, which is believed to lift sugar production in Maharashtra by 18% to 8.5 million tonnes for the crop year 2010-11. The sugar year runs from October to September. The farmers are bullish on the good rains and attractive returns on sugarcane prices, hence most of the farmers are likely to indulge in cane-cultivation, thereby raising the area under cane-cultivation by two lakh hectares to 10 lakh hectares in the 2010-11 crop year. Yields are also expected to improve to 83 tonnes per hectare from 78 tonnes per hectare in the review period. -- Regards Hardik Shah -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""GLOBAL SPECULATORS"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalspeculators?hl=en.
