New Delhi, Aug 21 - India will not hesitate to import food as and when the need arises to deal with this year's drought, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said here Friday, adding that stocks of grain with state-run agencies were healthy now.

'We will go for imports. But we do not make announcements of import in a very big way because that has another cascading effect,' the minister told a meeting with state agriculture ministers here.

'The moment news spreads India is going for heavy dosage of imports, then it will automatically have an impact on market prices being jacked up,' Mukherjee told the meeting called to deliberate on the current drought declared in 246 out of India's 626 administrative districts.

'The decision is already there. Whichever commodity is in short supply, to meet the demand and supply mechanism, we shall go for imports,' he said, adding that for commodities like edible oils and pulses, imports were on for a long time.

As news of a drought in India spread, sugar prices reached a 28-year high in the international market. India is the world's second largest sugarcane producer after Brazil.

Mukherjee said that thanks to the record production of food grain in India's last agriculture year (July 2008 - June 2009), estimated at 233.87 million tonnes, the country was approaching the drought with adequate buffer stocks.

According to him, as opposed to the normal buffer stock norm of four million tonnes of wheat and 5.2 million tonnes of rice, the country had created additional reserves of three million tonnes of wheat and two million tonnes of rice.