The harvesting of winter wheat and barley wascompleted during the recent monitoring period. Crop condition was generallyunfavorable, as indicated by the national NDVI development graph. Compared withaverage, rainfall (RAIN) suffered a significant decrease of 15%, while temperature(TEMP, -0.1°C) and radiation (RADPAR, -1%) were close to average. As a result,the biomass production potential (BIOMSS) was 8% below the average of therecent five years.

In about 56.7% of the country's arable land, mostlydistributed in the north and northeast, crop condition was slightly belowaverage. In areas mainly in the south and southeast, crops did better thanaverage in February and March, but condition deteriorated again later on. Cropcondition was unfavorable in the north and northeast of the country, with VCIxvalues below 0.5. Overall, the anticipation for 2017 crops is a below but closeto average output, considering also an increase in the fraction of croppedarable land (CALF) of 6 percentage points over the average for this indicatorfor the January-April period.

Figure 3.23. Pakistan crop condition, January-April 2017

(a)Crop condition development graph based on NDVI                                    (b) Maximum VCI

(c) Spatial NDVI patterns compared to 5YA                                 (d) NDVI Profile