Daybreak - India's mango paradox

Once upon a time, at a gathering in Delhi, Mirza Ghaleb, arguably the greatest Urdu poet that ever lived, was asked a very important question. What are the qualities that a mango should have? His answer became 1 of the most quoted things that he ever said about anything, apart from heartbreak, of course. Mangoes, said Ghaleb, need only 2 things. They should be sweet, and they should be in plenty.

From poetry to annual dinner table arguments about which variety is the best, mangoes are woven into the fabric of Indian life in a way that no other fruit comes close to. I myself am partial to Langara, though millions would argue for Alfonso, the export superstar. In The UK this season, a box of Alfonso's was selling for nearly £20, a price that the farmer who grew it would find hard to believe. This year, those same farmers reported losses of up to 90%, and among the worst harvests in living memory. Extreme heat had disrupted Alfonso's flowering at exactly the worst moment.

So the fruit simply did not set. And this was just the beginning of 1 of the worst years for Indian mangoes. In May, Japan suspended all Indian mango imports. A single treatment facility in Uttar Pradesh had failed a biosecurity inspection, and Japan, which requires its own inspectors to physically certify each batch, close the entire seasons market for every exporter in the country. And then, just earlier this week, Nepal sent Indian mango shipments back to the border.

The reason was inspectors found excessive pesticide residues in the fruit itself. Meanwhile, the war in Iran had already tripled air transport costs and effectively shut down the Gulf route, where the bulk of India's fresh mango exports go. In London, for example, a stallholder who has sold Alfonso's entouraging market for 24 years told the BBC that normally at this time of the year, London's high streets are flooded with them. This year, it's different. Now, here is the number that puts all of this in context.

India produces nearly half of the world's mangoes over 24,000,000 metric tons a year. But it exports only around 30,000 tons of fresh fruit. Of every thousand mangoes, basically, that are grown in this country, roughly 1 or 2 leave it as fresh fruit. To be fair, India does export significant volumes of mango pulp. But pulp is not what commands 19 to £20 a box in London.

The fresh market is where the ambition lies, and that is precisely where India keeps losing ground. So why does a country that grows half of the world's mangoes keeps getting shut out of market after market? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nigra Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague, Rachel Varghese, and I will come to you with 1 business story that's worth understanding and worth your time.

Today is Thursday, June 11. Let's start with what India could not control. The Alfonso crop failure was climate change. The Gulf root closure was geopolitics. But what happened with Japan and Nepal deserves a closer look.

You see, every year before the season opens, Japan sends a team of quarantine inspectors to India to oversee something called vapor heat Treatment or VHT, which is a non chemical process that exposes mangos to hot saturated air. The idea is to kill any fruit fly eggs or larvae inside without damaging the flesh. Japan, the EU, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Mauritius all require VHD as a condition of import. Japan has required it since 2006 when it lifted a ban on Indian mangoes that had lasted 20 years. India built dedicated facilities across 5 states specifically to win back that access and to serve all those markets simultaneously.

This March, inspectors arrived at a facility in Rehmanpur, Uttar Pradesh and found deficiencies in fumigation and disinfection. What followed was pretty immediate. The Yukohama Plant Protection Association announced that all Indian mango shipments certified after the March 25 would not be accepted. All of this points to a coordination failure that stretches back to years. India's record export to Japan was just 70 tons in 20 11 to 12.

For comparison, Pakistan with a fraction of India's production volume nearly doubled in a single season by 2019. So after 2012, India's Japan exports kind of collapsed and never really recovered. So this ban just seems to be the natural outcome of over a decade of institutional neglect of a market that India had actually worked hard to win back. Now, while Japan ban is about how India processes its mangoes after harvest, the Nepal rejection is about what goes into them before. Border inspectors found excessive pesticide residues in the fruit itself.

And research data from multiple sources points to the same thing. For example, research from Alfonso Orchards in Ratnagiri has documented heavy metal accumulation from pesticide use at levels above internationally agreed norms. Another survey of mango farmers in Tamil Nadu found that 85% of them spray on a fixed calendar schedule regardless of actual pest levels, and that nearly 80% of them take their recommendations from pesticide dealers rather than agricultural scientists. The pesticide problem in India runs deep, and we know it. Every summer, across the country, nutritionists and doctors advise people to soak their mangoes in water for at least 30 minutes before eating.

It is standard advice. And in a way, it is an acknowledgment that the fruit arriving in our homes carries chemical residues. So what Nepal's border inspectors did was just to make this reality visible. The events of this season have a long precedent. More on this in the next segment.

After the Japan ban on Indian mangoes back in 1986, which lasted 20 years, the EU followed. This was in 2014 over pest contamination that was found in hundreds of consignments of Indian fruits and vegetables. So it was only after 9 months of consistent diplomatic efforts and compliance assurances that the market reopened. Another example is The UAE, which is India's single largest mango export market. It previously found pesticide residues above prescribed limits in Indian consignments and warned that imports would stop if standards were not met.

The pattern across all of these is the same. A crisis comes to surface, emergency measures follow, the market eventually reopens, but the underlying conditions that produced the crisis remain largely unchanged. The VHD system which I talked about earlier shows how this happens. India has 6 treatment facilities to serve every market requiring VHD certification across a season, which runs from April to June. But this year when the Rehmanpur facility failed its inspection in March, the consequences would also affect other facilities that are already limited in number and are already serving multiple premium markets.

Then there is also the lack of planning. Japan, like I told you earlier, requires its own inspectors to be physically present during the treatment. And this has to be scheduled months before APEDA, which is the government body responsible for managing India's agricultural exports, is supposed to coordinate this. It is supposed to pool in exporters, commit volumes and schedule the inspection team. Even the pesticide monitoring system in India tells a similar story.

For example, APEDA introduced a farm to fork residue testing program for export mangoes in 2006 covering registered farmers from orchard to packhouse. But the program reaches only farmers registered for export, which is a fraction of total growers within the GI zone. And even among registered farmers, spraying too close to harvest has been a documented and recurring problem. Nepal's inspectors found excessive residues this week in the fruit that had presumably moved through this same system. And then underlying all of this is a coal chain built well below the scale that India's export ambitions require.

India loses an estimated thirty-forty percent of its fruit and vegetable crop every year between harvest and consumer, with pack houses, reefer vehicles and ripening chambers all operating at a fraction of required capacity. Which is why when the Gulf route closed this season, exporters had nowhere to hold the fruit while they waited for conditions to change. The fruit went from domestic markets at half the export price or was rotting entirely. Over time, this infrastructure gap has redirected India's mango trade. The country now exports more than double the volume of mango pulp compared to fresh fruit, with processing becoming the dominant mode because compliance and logistics that fresh export markets demand have proved too difficult to sustain consistently across seasons.

Khalib had asked for 2 things sweet mangoes and plenty of them. India grows nearly half of the world's mangoes more than any other country on earth and the plenty has never really been in question. But the system to deliver that plenty to the rest of the world with the consistency and compliance that premium markets demand is what has remained unbuilt. Until that changes, the country that grows half of the world's mangoes will keep getting shut out.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's 1st subscriber focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long form feature stories, newsletters, and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to theken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the web site. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Sinthas Sharma and edited by Rajeev CN.