South and Southeast Asia is a broad region, covering India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam, where the common crops include rice, maize, wheat, and soybean. During the current monitoring period, temperature and sunshine were overall near average (TEMP +0.5°C, RADPAR +4%) while rainfall significantly decreased (RAIN -16%). Rainfall anomalies, however, underwent large spatial and temporal variations. Rainfall increased markedly between mid-May and July, a key period of crop growth. 6.2% of cultivated areas, mainly in Myanmar, experienced significantly below-average rainfall (deficit larger than 100 mm/dekad) during mid-May and mid-June and above-average  (excess larger than 150 mm/dekad) during early June. Two other rainfall peaks with excesses close to 200 mm/dekad occurred in early and mid-July. The first  affected 12.3% of cropland located in central-northern India and central Vietnam; the second was of concern to 9,5% of cropland in southern India and Nepal. 6.3% of cropped areas, involving Nepal and north India, recorded consistently below-average temperature during April through July. Remaining areas (making up 93.7% of cropland) showed fluctuating but near average temperature over the most of the reporting period.

CALF reached a rather low value of 69% in the MPZ, 5% below the average of the recent five years, with VCIx at 0.87, a value describing fair crops. CALF and VCIx are high over Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Uncropped areas mainly occur in south and central India and Myanmar, where they are associated with Low VCIx values below 0.5 and in the range from 0.5 to 0.8. Below-average BIOMSS occurred in central and southern India and Myanmar, which may be attributed to drought. This is confirmed by the spatial patterns of VHIn, indicating that “severe drought” also occurred in these regions.  It is stressed that BIOMSS and VCIx patterns roughly agree, with a marked discrepancy in the "three-State corner" of southern Rajasthan, northern Gujarat and south-western Madhya Pradesh where VCIx mostly exceeds 1.0 while BIOMSS shows one of the largest negative anomalies (larger than 20%) in the whole MPZ. Based on the above analyses, the crop production the MPZ is expected to be below average.

Figure 2.4. South and South-east Asia MPZ: Agroclimatic and agronomic indicators, April–July 2019.

a. Spatial distribution of rainfall profiles.  b. Profiles of rainfall departure from average (mm)

c. Spatial distribution of temperature profiles.    d. Profiles of temperature departure from average (mm).

e. e. e. Maximum VCI

f. Cropped arable land

g. Biomass accumulation potential departure

h. VHI minimum