New Delhi, Sept. 4 -- Torrential rains across key food-bowl states, including in Punjab, have inundated thousands of hectares of farmland, destroying crops, some weeks away from harvest. Rains disrupt supply lines, making food prices, especially of perishables, volatile. And because food prices make up 24.38% of the country's basket for measuring wholesale inflation, continuing rough weather could cause price pressures to build up again, analysts said. On Thursday, Union food minister Prahlad Joshi is slated to launch retail sales of onions purchased and stocked by the government to stave off vegetable inflation. Flooding and storms this summer are sure to ruin a lot of food crops in many states, and in Punjab, heavy rain in upper catchment areas of the Beas and Ravi rivers has impacted agriculture in at least 8-10 districts of a total of 23, said Harvir Singh of Rural Voice, which tracks the agri economy. Nearly 14 states have activated their state disaster response forces for rescue and evacuation, an official in New Delhi said, adding that enumerating farm losses can only happen when rain ceases. "This season, places like Jammu have seen the highest rainfall since 1950 of over 612mm," Mukhtar Ahmad, director, India Meteorological Department (IMD), J&K, said. Episodes of Western Disturbances, which are storm systems, have increased from four or five to about 12 this year, increasing the amount of rainfall, across the grain baskets of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. In Punjab alone, the losses to farmers have been estimated to touch Rs.1,000 crore, said Rural Voice's Singh, due to damage to maize, paddy and cotton. "My cotton crop was weeks away from harvest but storms blew them away. I'm ruined," said Satyadev Patel from Gujarat's Vadodara. Consumer prices dipped to an eight-year low of 1.55% in July as food inflation swooned downward by -1.76%. However, rainfall deviations raise vegetable inflation by about 1.24 percentage points, according to a recent study by the RBI....