NEW DELHI (Commodity Online): Delayed monsoon rains have severely affected the sowing in India’s key producing state Utter Pradesh. Rice production this year is expected to be half of what was yielded in previous year, a state official was quoted by Dow Jones on Wednesday.

Because of the late start to sowing, large swathes of farmlands may not be planted at all this year, UP Agriculture Minister, Chaudhury Laxmi Narain, told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview.

India’s overall monsoon rainfall between June 1 and Aug. 31 has been 23% below a 50-year average, according to government estimates.

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Narain said production of every crop will be lower in the fiscal year ending March, but the water-intensive rice crop will be the worst-hit. Planting of pulses, sugarcane and oilseeds have all suffered because of the lack of rains. Narain said area under rice crop in Utter Pradesh this year has fallen to 3.4 million hectares from 6 million hectares planted last summer.

The northern state of Uttar Pradesh produced 13.2 million tons of rice in 2008- 09, of which 12.3 million tons were bought by the federal government to build stocks. UP, as the state is popularly known, is one of the top three contributors to the federal government’s rice stocks.