Tropical Agriculture and Seasonal Rainfall Dependence

Wet, or paddy, rice cultivation is the defining crop of monsoon Asia, and its entire agricultural calendar is built around the arrival of the summer rains: fields are typically plowed and flooded and seedlings transplanted in the weeks following monsoon onset, so that a delayed or deficient monsoon directly threatens both planting schedules and eventual yields across a region that includes the great river deltas of the Ganges-Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Irrawaddy, among the most densely farmed and densely populated agricultural landscapes on Earth. Rice remains the staple calorie source for more than half of humanity, and in India alone more than half the population still depends on agriculture, directly or indirectly, for its livelihood, a dependence that makes the monsoon's annual performance a matter tracked as closely by national economic planners as by individual farming households.