This will require that crop land dedicated for this purpose be expanded from 88 million acres now to about 233 million acres (slightly more than half of our 461 million acres totalcrop land to meet about 7% of our total automotive fuel needs).
The recent decrease in rainfall has occurred during the country's dry season, and has thus affected only the second rice crop, which accounts for a fifth of the total in a normal year.
All told, production-distorting aid (the sort keyed to crop and agricultural input prices) fell from about two-thirds of the total to less than one-third.