LALITPUR (Nepal) - EVERY year, Nepalese rice farmer Ratnakaji Maharjan celebrates the arrival of the monsoon rains by attending a centuries-old festival in this historic town near Kathmandu.

Climate changes MR BALGOBINDA Pathak, a government agriculture official in western Achham district, said he was expecting serious food shortages later in the year. Experts say Nepal is unprepared for the changing weather patterns, and will have to do more to adapt to rising temperatures and increasingly erratic rainfall. ... more

The annual event, in which a huge chariot said to carry the Hindu rain god Machchindra Nath is pulled through the streets of Lalitpur, draws crowds from across the Kathmandu Valley to celebrate and pray for a good monsoon.

But this year, Mr Maharjan's mood was more subdued than celebratory as he queued to worship before the wooden chariot.

'The weather patterns seem to have changed, and we don't know how to adjust.' Nepal's long-delayed monsoon finally arrived in the Kathmandu Valley on Monday, allowing local farmers to begin transplanting their seedlings to the waterlogged rice paddies after weeks of anxious waiting.

But there are fears the delay could prove devastating for this year's rice crop, and experts say the increasing unpredictability of the weather is causing huge problems for farmers in one of the world's poorest countries.

The delayed monsoon meant a lot of young seedlings died, and even those that could be planted won't have time to mature enough to yield a good crop.' Rice accounts for almost 50 per cent of cereal production in Nepal, which is particularly dependent on rainfall because less than one-third of its agricultural land is irrigated.

The delay to the monsoon came after the landlocked country suffered its driest winter for 40 years, resulting in a fall of 20-25 per cent in the production of wheat, Nepal's second-biggest crop after rice.

- Serious food shortages looming - Three years after Nepal's decade-long civil war came to an end, the World Food Programme (WFP) says many people are still living in near-crisis conditions, with 41 per cent of the population undernourished.

Almost one in four Nepalese people live on less than a dollar a day, and around 2.7 million depend on WFP food aid.

WFP country director for Nepal Richard Ragan told AFP that the latest drought was particularly devastating because it followed more than 18 months of high food prices and years of poor crop production in many areas. Some local officials are predicting worse to come if this year's rice harvest is poor. -- AFP