No fruit in India is as universally loved and as eagerly anticipated as the mango, which, for one brief window each year, cools and sweetens the long days of summer.
Mangoes are added to kebabs, used to sour dishes and pureed with mint to make refreshing drinks. Connoisseurs argue fervently about which of India’s dozens of varieties — each with a distinct flavour, colour and texture — are best and disagree politely about the correct way to eat the fruit: By cutting it into slices or by sucking the juice straight from the top.
But this year, this centuries-old ritual is imperiled. As blistering heat has struck northern India weeks earlier than usual, mango crops have been devastated, threatening a way of life for the thousands of small farmers who grow the fruit and the millions more who consume it.
The heat wave is a vivid example of the challenge India faces in ensuring its food security as the effects of climate change worsen, compounding its difficulties in raising agricultural productivity to international standards to feed a growing population of nearly 1.4 billion.
The dangers of a hotter future are achingly visible on a small farm in Malihabad, a prime northern mango-growing district, where Mohammed Aslam tends about 500 trees.
A few months ago, his mango trees were the picture of health, their deep green leaves glistening above the well-hydrated soil and their branches bearing perfect clusters of white flowers. Then India experienced its hottest March in 122 years of record-keeping, with temperatures averaging nearly 92 degrees Fahrenheit and soaring as high as 104. The mango flowers withered and died before bearing fruit.
Virtually none of Aslam’s trees, spread over 4 acres, produced mangoes. In a normal year, they would have yielded more than 25,000 pounds of fruit.
“I have never witnessed this phenomenon before in my lifetime'', he said as he looked over his farm in the state of Uttar Pradesh one recent afternoon, lamenting the thousands of dollars he stood to lose on the failed harvest.
Aslam is one of hundreds of farmers who have watched helplessly as the intense heat of March continued into the hottest April in 50 years and then carried on into May. Climate scientists, in a report issued, said the chances of such a heat wave in India had increased by at least 30 times since the 19th century.
The heat has far exceeded the optimal temperature for fertilisation of mango trees, which is around 77 degrees Fahrenheit, said Dheeraj Kumar Tiwari, a scientist at an agricultural university in Uttar Pradesh.
India is the world’s largest mango producer, accounting for nearly 50 per cent of the global crop. Much of it is consumed domestically, but the country exports tens of millions of dollars’ worth of mangoes each year to the UAE, Britain, Germany and the United States. Over the past decade, India has been trying to penetrate markets in other European Union countries as well.
In the past, export growth has been limited by the higher costs of Indian mangoes compared with those from countries like Brazil, Peru, Israel and Pakistan. India has been striving to increase productivity, which would lower costs.
Even before the extreme heat, India’s mango exports had been badly damaged by the supply chain disruptions of the pandemic, with shipments abroad shrinking by almost 50 per cent last year. India’s top export organisation had hoped for a big turnaround this year as the Indian and US governments eased trade rules.
Instead, severe weather has hurt yields not just in northern India but also in the south, which has been hit by heavy, untimely rain.
In Uttar Pradesh, the northern mango-growing powerhouse, a government agriculture official estimated that mango production in the state would fall by close to 20 per cent this year. The Mango Growers Association said the yield in the northern mango-growing belt would fall by closer to 70 per cent.
In the state of Andhra Pradesh, in the south, the heavy rains delayed the mango plants’ flowering by a month. By the time the fruits emerged, it was too hot, and many dropped from the branches prematurely.
B Sreenivasulu, Deputy Director in the Horticulture Department of the Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh, said that during the heavy rainfall that lashed the area in November and December, when flowering occurs, farms were inundated and many riverside trees were uprooted.
Cultivation of mangoes in the district, the most productive in the state, has been reduced by at least 30 per cent this season. “This time, the climate change effect was so visible'', Sreenivasulu said. “Like never before.”
The harsher conditions threaten mango-growing cultures with roots stretching back hundreds of years. — New York Times
Suhasini Raj
The writer has worked for over a decade with Indian and international news outlets
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