HONG KONG  Rain and snow during the past two weeks, together with a huge irrigation effort, appear to have saved much of the wheat crop in northern China from drought, Chinese and international agricultural and meteorological experts said Monday.

This winter was the driest in perhaps 200 years in parts of China, the world’s largest wheat producer. That prompted alarm a month ago that China might need to sharply increase its usually modest wheat imports, at a time when world food prices were already surging. Supplies were tight after bad weather in other wheat-producing countries, including Russia and Australia.

But days of snow and rain across the heart of China’s wheat belt in northern Henan and western Shandong Provinces have brought moisture to fields so dry that large cracks appeared in the dirt. The precipitation arrived at just the right moment, experts said, as vulnerable wheat planted last autumn was coming out of its winter dormancy and needed to grow or it would die.

“Things look better, definitely, and the government seems to be in control with irrigation and providing a lot of assistance to farmers,” Kisan Gunjal, an official at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, said in a telephone interview on Monday. Mr. Gunjal is responsible for food shortfall alerts in Asia.