Has it shaken your kitchen too? Making sense of India's climate-driven tomato crisis

Indian cuisine, celebrated for its wide array of flavours, finds itself heavily dependent on the indispensabletomato. However, in recent days,this culinary essential has been banished from homes and restaurant menus across the country.

As per farmers and agriculture experts, the significant increase in tomato prices in India, surpassing 400 per cent, can be linked to crop failure inducedby extremely high temperatures and heavy rainfall.

Chhavi Shukla, who runs a home kitchen in Noida,told WION that the price hike has disturbed her set menu for the week.

"I predominantly design my meal plans based on profit margins, which are already quite narrow. However, with the sharp rise in tomato prices, I have been compelled to decrease its usage and adjust the pricing of my meal plans," she said.

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The decision is attributed to both quality concerns and a limited supply of tomatoes.

Connaught Plaza Restaurants, which oversees McDonald's franchises in the northern and eastern parts of India, displayed notices outside the affected restaurants, stating that they were unable to procure an adequate quantity of tomatoes that met their stringent quality standards.

This development gained widespread attention on social media, with Raghav Chadha, a member of parliament from the Aam Aadmi Party, sharing photos of the notices.

“Even McDonald’s can’t afford tomatoes anymore,” Chadha wrote on Twitter. “Be it in our homes or restaurants, with inflation spiralling out of control, the government has turned happy meals into sad meals.”

Climate change-related extreme weather events are a significant contributing factor to the present scarcity of tomatoes, said Nimish Singh, Associate Fellow at the Earth Science and Climate Change Division, The Energy and Resources Institute(TERI).

“This year, India witnessed an early summer with high temperatures in February, followed by heat waves in March and April. Additionally, unseasonal rainstorms in May and an early onset of the monsoon led to the failure of tomato production in Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Consequently, tomatoes have become expensive in these regions. Furthermore, the heavy rainfall spells have disrupted the vegetable supply chain, resulting in a further increase in prices for not only tomatoes but also almost all agricultural produce,” Singh told WION.

The inherent flaws in our agricultural system are also to be blamed.

Insufficient infrastructure stands out as a key drawback in our agricultural system. Vegetables and fruits, with their limited shelf life, are susceptible to damage prior to reaching consumers. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a well-functioning cold chain infrastructure to address this issue, explains Singh.

How can we rectify this recurrent problem?

Currently, the majority of our agricultural practices rely on high-yielding variety seeds, which have proven to be highly susceptible to climate fluctuations.

“As the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity continues to grow, it has become crucial to promote the cultivation of indigenous crops,” says Singh.

By cultivating these native crops, we can make our agriculture climate-smart, genetically diverse, and sustainable. These crops possess the remarkable ability to thrive in their respective climates and exhibit resistance against prevalent pests and diseases, he adds.

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