Last year it was wheat, then sugar. This year it’s tomatoes.
As weather patterns become more erratic — rainfall too heavy and often out of sync with agricultural calendars, and heat cycles starting earlier and breaking records — food shortages are one of many ways India is reeling from climate change.
Supply is dwindling and prices are skyrocketing – in the case of tomatoes, at least a five-fold increase between May and mid-July according to official figures, and even a stronger spike based on consumer bills. The government has been forced to take emergency measures, limiting exports and marketing subsidized supplies to mitigate the shock to the world’s most populous nation.
In recent weeks, families have been rationing their intake of tomatoes, which are essential to the Indian diet. They omit tomatoes from salads, keeping the few tomatoes they can afford to spice up the main dish. Some, fearing even higher prices, have stored tomatoes as a puree in their freezers. Restaurants have removed tomato-heavy items from their menus or increased prices. McDonald’s dropped tomatoes from its hamburgers in large parts of northern and eastern India.
Tomatoes have even found their way into the middle of India’s rough and increasingly polarized politics. A prominent leader of the ruling Hindu nationalist party, Himanta Biswa Sarma, blamed the country’s Muslims for the price hike. A shopkeeper in the Varanasi district of Uttar Pradesh, a supporter of an opposition party, hired uniformed bouncers to guard his small stash of tomatoes.
“We used to eat about two or three kilograms of tomatoes a week with our family of five,” says Neeta Agarwal, a software developer who was shopping in East Delhi one night recently. “Now we only consume half a kilo a week.”
In some areas, prices have skyrocketed from 30 rupees per kilogram, or about 13 cents per pound, to more than 200 rupees.
“We have stopped eating tomatoes in salads,” Ms Agarwal added, “and we don’t make tomato-based vegetable dishes. We only use tomatoes for little base sauce for lentils and curries.”
India, like much of South Asia, is on the front lines of climate change. Extreme weather events are testing the resilience the country has tried to build over the past few decades to mitigate the loss of life caused by extreme poverty and disease. Floods and droughts continue to displace large numbers of people. Agriculture, which provides a livelihood for more than half of the population, has already struggled to be profitable due to a lack of crop diversity and unreliable market arrangements that have fueled farmer debt, suicides and protests. The increasing unpredictability of climate patterns and the constant threat of catastrophic events have only made matters worse.
But nowhere is India’s vulnerability to climate change felt more emphatically than in food security. While the country has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in recent decades, analysts say much of India’s population of 1.4 billion remains just above the mark, vulnerable to any shock.
In a report last year, the United Nations noted the increase in extreme weather events in South Asia, saying they will “adversely affect food availability and prices.”
India’s agriculture ministry told the country’s parliament earlier this year that “wheat yields are expected to fall by 19.3 percent by 2050 and 40 percent by 2080,” while maize yields could fall by as much as 18 to 23 percent over the same period.
It became clear last year how much vigilance food security requires.
At the beginning of the year, the government announced it would expand exports to help countries facing wheat shortages following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But soon after, it quietly reversed the decision to the other extreme: pushing back even previous export levels.
The reason: the wheat harvest was disrupted by extreme weather patterns. Untimely rainfall flooded the fields and then the extreme heat dried up the grain. The result was a drop in yields of at least 3.5 percent, with some parts of the country seeing losses of up to 15 percent. When the sugar cane harvest also experienced a similar decline, the government also put a brake on sugar exports as a precaution.
“We need to foresee and plan for the impact of climate change on food production,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent agricultural economist. “We have to maintain sufficient food supplies for at least two years, because any season can go wrong.”
According to growers and traders, the tomato shortage is the result of a disruption of supply and demand on the market, followed by extreme weather conditions.
The previous tomato harvest was such a record harvest that many farmers had no buyers. Tomatoes rot in fields, because the cheap prices on the market didn’t even justify the shipping costs.
That discouraged some farmers from growing tomatoes for the current harvest.
What would have been a smaller harvest was then exacerbated by extreme heat in March and April, followed by flooding in recent weeks that not only destroyed fields, but also swept away bridges and blocked roads in parts of northern India.
In recent weeks, as tomato prices became a dominant issue, the Indian government has released as many as 330 tons of tomatoes to the market – first at the subsidized price of 90 rupees per kilo and then at 70 rupees per kilo.
“When farmers were struggling, there was no help from the government,” said Yogesh Rayate, a tomato grower in the Nashik district of Maharashtra, in the western part of the country. “But when urban consumers suffer, there’s a lot of crying and crying.”
