Wheat, Sugar, and Now Tomatoes: Extreme Weather Dents India’s Food Supplies

Last year it was wheat, then sugar. This year, it is tomatoes.

As weather patterns grow erratic — rainfalls too heavy and often out of sync with farming calendars, and heat cycles beginning earlier and breaking records — food shortages are one of the many ways India is reeling from climate change.

Supplies have been shrinking, and prices shooting up — in the case of tomatoes, at least a fivefold increase between May and mid-July according to official figures, and even a steeper spike based on consumer accounts. The government has been forced to take emergency measures, curbing exports and injecting subsidized supplies to the market to reduce the shock on the world’s most populous nation.

In recent weeks, families have been rationing their intake of tomatoes, which are fundamental to the Indian diet. They’re omitting tomatoes from salads, keeping the few they can afford for flavoring the main dish. Some, out of fear of even higher prices, have been stocking tomatoes as purée in their freezers. Restaurants have been removing tomato-heavy items from their menus or hiking the prices. McDonald’s dropped tomatoes from its burgers in large parts of north and eastern India.

Tomatoes have even found their way to the middle of India’s raucous, and increasingly polarized, politics. A prominent leader of the ruling Hindu nationalist party, Himanta Biswa Sarma, blamed the country’s Muslims for the price rise. A shopkeeper in the Varanasi district of Uttar Pradesh, a supporter of an opposition party, hired in-uniform bouncers to guard his small tomato supply.

“Earlier, we would consume about two or three kilos of tomatoes a week in our family of five,” said Neeta Agarwal, a software developer who was out shopping one recent evening in east Delhi. “Now we are only consuming half a kilo per week.”

In some areas, prices have skyrocketed from 30 rupees per kilogram, or roughly 13 cents a pound, to more than 200 rupees.