Climate change threatens traditional food storage systems — and ways of life

Since long before anyone could remember, the village of Haripur in India’s western Maharashtra state stored tons of turmeric in underground pits.

Haripur’s soil is good at regulating moisture and provides the right kind of insulation and resistance from pest attacks to keep turmeric fresh. This food storage system, locally known as peve, keeps harvested turmeric safe for at least a decade. These pits transformed the turmeric trade, making India’s Sangli district, 5 kilometers from Haripur, a significant turmeric trading center, where an average of 139,965 quintals (nearly 14,000 metric tons) of turmeric is traded every year.

At points in the last 50 years, Haripur contained over 5,000 such storage pits, each of them at least 25 feet deep with the ability to store up to 25,000 kilograms of turmeric — along with cereals such as wheat, sorghum, and maize — according to local peve owners. Traders and farmers would travel from hundreds of kilometers to store their crops in Haripur.