Rotten bananas in a scorching India expose climate's food cost

Early each morning in the Indian city of Bhubaneswar, wholesaler Gadadhara Mohanty waits anxiously for trucks carrying bananas to a food market from a few hundred kilometers away. With no refrigeration in his storeroom, a single-day delay in selling the bananas can reduce the value of his stockpile by at least 10 per cent.

When they arrive, he will sort through bushels and inspect the skins for signs of decay.

“There’s a huge loss during summer months if the sales lag,” he said.

This is no small problem for India, where as much as 15 per cent of fruits and vegetables are lost after harvesting, despite still-persistent malnutrition and hunger. The spoiled food comes down largely to poor infrastructure. Most farmers here are small producers who can’t invest heavily in cooling and refrigeration along the supply chain. In addition, India wastes nearly 80 million (eight crore) tons of food at the retail and consumer level, second only to China. As climate changes exacerbates extreme heat, the numbers are likely to worsen in South Asia, one of the most vulnerable regions to rising temperatures.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has modernized much of India’s infrastructure, but farmers say progress in their sector lags others. Though production of grains, fruits and vegetables is increasing, refrigeration is still inadequate across the supply chain. Outside of urban areas, storage, transportation and retail distribution are slowed by India’s rutted roads and the distance between farms and wholesale markets. In turn, spoilage during transit adds to the cost of procurement, pushing up consumer prices — a major concern during India’s election, which wraps up next month. Compared to grain, which can be stored for months or years, produce’s short shelf life makes it harder to hedge.

Take bananas. To reach wholesale markets in Bhubaneswar, in eastern India, trucks travel nearly 24 hours from farms in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. India is the world’s largest producer of bananas, which are highly perishable. To keep fruit cool on the journey, they’re covered with leaves during transit. It’s far from a solution: India lost Rs 1,53,071 crore ($18.4 billion) of food in fiscal year 2020-21, about a fifth of that from spoilt fruit.

“The cold storage capacity hasn’t done justice to the small-holder farmers of our country,” said Pawanexh Kohli, former chief of the state-run National Centre for Cold-Chain Development. “They are forced to make distress sales.”

Soaring temperatures are raising the stakes for India’s farmers. In Andhra Pradesh, cultivators say they’re losing a greater number of crops from extreme weather. Each spoiled bunch, or about 80 to 130 bananas, is a substantial financial setback, with farmers missing out on as much as Rs 150 for each grouping. Rising costs for farm inputs such as fertilizers further squeeze already tight margins.

Venkatanaidu Guntreddi, 50, who grows bananas across 150 acres (61 hectares) of land, doesn’t see affordable remedies. Andhra Pradesh’s maximum temperature in 2023 was the second-highest on record since 1901. Guntreddi figures that a cold storage facility would help prolong the shelf life of his produce, but it’s not something he can afford.

“There is no profit in cultivation because brokers make most of the money and we are hit by extreme weather,” Guntreddi said, pointing to withered banana plants on a tour of his farm in the village of Parajapadu. He urged the local authorities to help farmers set up processing units to make products such as banana chips and wine — avenues that would cut losses from crops destroyed by the heat.

India has cold storage capacity of more than 30 million tons. The refrigerators are largely used by wholesalers and retailers for potatoes, a staple in almost every Indian meal. What the country lacks is an adequate number of refrigerated trucks and pack-houses, facilities used to keep fruits and vegetables cool right after they’re harvested.

Crossing some of the region’s major banana growing areas, farmers say they’re always in a hurry to immediately offload fresh fruits and vegetables because they don’t often have access to pack-houses, which tend to be far from their plots. In turn, they’re forced to sell crops at whatever prices brokers and traders offer. India provides a subsidy of 35 per cent to 50 per cent to set up storage facilities, including pack-houses, according to the food processing ministry. Aid for frozen storage infrastructure is slightly higher. But many say even with those incentives, the costs are still too high.

Siraj Hussain, a former farm secretary, said investors are also put off from modernizing infrastructure because most food is sold informally by street vendors and small shops. “Large investment in the food chain is not considered profitable,” he said.

Anita Praveen, secretary at India’s Ministry of Food Processing Industries, didn’t reply to requests for comment for this story.

On a recent day, Bhanu Rokkam, 32, a banana farmer from Thotapalli, in Andhra Pradesh, began harvesting at dawn to evade the scorching sun. It took him nearly four hours to gather around 250 bunches. A pair of brothers, acting as brokers, purchased the fruits from Rokkam, offering an average of 200 to 220 rupees per bunch, excluding transportation expenses. That range is about 12 per cent less than what Rokkam might expect during the cooler months. He said brokers use the hot weather to their advantage.

In the neighboring state of Odisha, retailers are also constrained by the lack of cold storage infrastructure, leading them to only purchase the amount of fruit they can sell on the same day. This limitation affects their ability to stockpile and sometimes impacts availability. Consumers bear the brunt of supply chain losses, as costs incurred throughout the chain are passed on, resulting in higher fruit prices.

Mahadev Barik, a street vendor in Bhubaneswar, sells more than one thousand bananas every day. His losses sometimes climb to as much as 30 per cent when the heat is so bad that he’s forced to sell below the purchase rate. With temperatures this extreme, he now takes his cart out in the evenings.

“The bananas turn black during the day,” he said.