- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIAN consumers continue to face challenges as with the cost of fuel and edible oil, the price of onions – a basic ingredient in most Indian food – also head north, thanks to heavy rainfall in the key growing regions of the vegetable.
Onions are also known to be a politically sensitive vegetable since their rising prices have seen more than one provincial government tumbling in the past.
“The price of every essential commodity has gone up. Edible oil, sugar prices rose earlier and now onions and tomato prices have more than doubled in a fortnight, how one can manage a monthly budget when incomes are not rising?” Reuters quoted Subhangi Patil, a consumer in Mumbai as saying.
India is also one the world’s largest onion exporters and the rise in the price could see the government restricting shipments which would lift the prices in countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Malaysia, the report cited traders as saying.
“Too much rainfall in September led to disease attack and stunted growth of onion bulbs,” Samadhan Bagul, a farmer from Dhule district in the western state if Maharashtra who expects to harvest just one tonne of onions from an acre of land, Reuters added. He usually harvests five tonnes.
Indian states such as Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujarat which are key onion-producing regions of the country received as much as 268 per cent more rain than normal in September, the weather department said.
As a result of the rain damaged, supplies got limited and that more than doubled the wholesale prices at Lasalgaon in Maharashtra, India’s largest onion-trading hub to Rs 33,400 (£322) a tonne in just a month. Similarly, retail prices in metro cities such as Mumbai have gone above Rs 50 (£0.48) a kilogram, the Reuters report added.
One trader in Mumbai told the news outlet on the condition of anonymity that prices of the commodity are likely to remain firm during the ongoing festive season before seeing a moderation in the middle of January when supplies go up from the new season crop.
The rising prices of onions in India also have left an impact in the international market as countries importing them from India have now shifted focus to other supplying nations like Turkey and Egypt, Ajit Shah, the president of Onion Exporters’ Association in Mumbai, told the news outlet.
In the previous two years, India stopped exporting onions for a few months for the local prices to ease but the move saw a shortage in neighbouring Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
