Weather shocks upset Indian food prices in a now-familiar global trend

If you can afford tomatoes right now, you are rich. That’s the running joke on Indian Twitter and family WhatsApp groups as prices of this staple in Indian cooking have tripled in recent weeks beyond Rs 150, or roughly $2, for a kilogram in parts of India, forcing many households to cut back. This year extreme weather has disrupted every stage of the country’s tomato crop from production to distribution, sending prices spiraling out of control, experts say. Agriculture in general is affected by such weather fluctuations, and prices of other vegetables have surged, too. The high prices are the result of a double whammy: Record-breaking temperatures caused heatwaves in May and June, followed by heavy monsoon rainfall in several tomato-growing states. And last year tomato prices crashed due to excess supply, leaving farmers with losses — which is one reason why many did not sow the crop this year, further reducing supply. “What it brings in is a lot of uncertainty, because, for instance, farmers don't know when to sow, how much to sow and where to sow, etc. And that causes market participants to also anticipate wrongly the amount of production,” said Dipti Deshpande, principal economist at CRISIL, an Indian company that provides market intelligence and analytics. The rising cost of tomatoes in India is an example of how extreme weather is affecting food prices and threatening global food security. Climate scientists have long warned these trends will become commonplace as global temperatures rise. Rising weather extremes have led to more and more crop losses in Asia, Europe, and Africa, with more to come. There is growing acknowledgment of how food insecurity, conflict, and climate change are interconnected. The impact of climate change on food security was discussed last week at the United Nations Food Systems Summit in Rome. The United Arab Emirates, which is hosting this year’s U.N. Climate Summit, of COP 28, last week launched an agenda for the event that calls on governments to align their food systems, agriculture, and climate action strategies. Climate change and unpredictability The seasonal fluctuations in weather, combined with unpredictability linked to climate change, are catching India’s farmers, markets, and governments unprepared, experts say. “Climate change is happening. Warming has happened. The atmosphere is more humid so there is like a steroid on weather events. So, everything has a climate change contribution,” said Raghu Murtugudde, an earth system scientist and emeritus professor at the University of Maryland and visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay. “What is unique this year is the combination of natural variability like El Niño, and cyclones and typhoons.” In India, parts of the same states that flooded in monsoons earlier this summer are now facing dry periods. “So, the whiplash is really not just climate change, but the combination of natural variability as well,” Murtugudde said. The increasing frequency of extreme weather makes it hard for farmers to plan and affects the lowest-income ones the most. Small farmers in India and many parts of the world depend on rainfall and might not always have access to irrigation facilities. Delayed rains and high temperatures lead to parched crops. Then, when sudden floods wash away crops, farmers often are not sure whether to sow crops a second time or whether more floods are likely in the same season. This time, the floods have also affected the distribution of harvested vegetables as the floodwaters clogged major roads. Whether this will repeat next year is unclear. “We’ll see a different pattern, different combination of patterns,” Murtugudde said. A global trend Of course, the trend of spikes in food prices due to weather shocks is not restricted to India. In 2022, food prices soared in Pakistan in the aftermath of devastating floods. Experts say the floods were likely worsened by climate change. The price of food items rose, leading to food insecurity for months afterward, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO. This March, the World Food Programme drew attention to the deepening climate crisis in the Middle East and North Africa region. In Iraq and Syria, prolonged droughts combined with conflicts have reduced cultivated areas and reduced food production, WFP said in a press release. The countries were also battered by heat waves, wildfires, flooding, erratic rainfall, and landslides, all of which disrupted food growing and distribution. Evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean shows that small farmers are often the worst hit and the resulting food insecurity disproportionately affects women. Ramping up early warning systems There’s a lot governments can do to mitigate the impact of some of the crop losses, Deshpande said. This includes local responses such as offering crop insurance, sharing information about extreme weather in advance, promoting high-yielding crop varieties, and improving storage and distribution infrastructure. India’s government has taken many of these measures, but implementation varies from state to state and can be uneven. FAO has emphasized the challenges the agriculture industry faces due to climate change, and it is pushing for climate action in its framework for 2022 to 2031. It is pushing for the use of better technology and data as well as including farmers, local communities, and local institutions. FAO is also expected to release a road map at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in November to guide the agriculture sector in reducing emissions from food and agriculture systems so investors know what initiatives and technologies to back. The goal is to help with climate targets to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Murtugudde said investing in early warning systems for weather and ensuring farmers have access to this information will help them adapt better and manage food prices. This is something the World Meteorological Organization, along with the United Nations, is pushing for around the world. This is already happening to some extent, but there is room for improvement, he said. For example, large farmers with more resources tend to have better access to more weather and climate information, while small farmers tend to follow their lead. Some local governments are more proactive than others in disseminating weather forecasts to farmers. For now, the Indian government has said it is making efforts to bring down the cost of tomatoes and has managed to do so in some places. But the food prices are likely to remain high for customers for a while. “When I speak to some of our analysts, I’m told that it will be a pressure point for a couple of months,” Deshpande said. She cautioned that India’s floods are currently washing away sown crops, which means the pressure of high price rises will be felt longer — but it is hard to predict the impact with accuracy at this stage. “People have to realize that agriculture is very much dependent on rainfall distribution, crop calendar, and [when] those get perturbed we get shocks in food prices,” Murtugudde said. “So, the government has to figure out how to evolve plans for produce and vegetables.”