Almost every Indian meal requires an onion — one of the cooking essentials along with sugar and lentils that sweet-talking politicians use to curry favor with voters by lowering costs.
However, their policies to cut prices by slapping export bans on some goods, including on onions and sugar, or by allowing duty-free imports of lentils, has made the key voting demographic of farmers furious.
They say that politicians’ decisions flood the markets, and that the savings shoppers make are at their expense.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“The governments talk a lot about us, but their actions only hurt us — to keep the easily agitated city people happy by keeping our produce cheap,” onion farmer Kanha Vishnu Gulave said.
Gulave, 28, comes from India’s onion-producing heartland of Nashik District in Maharashtra state, which produces about 40 percent of onions nationwide.
He felt cheated when prices crashed after a sudden export ban in December last year.
“We dread elections,” said Bharat Dighole, president of the onion producers’ association for Maharashtra. “The most unwise interventions come around polls.”
After the ban, prices dropped to sometimes less than one-third of what they were, Dighole said.
That sparked dozens of small-scale protests in Maharashtra.
At the same time, production expenses have more than doubled since 2017, Dighole added.
However, the slump in wholesale prices meant that was not passed on to the consumer — or voter, from the politicians’ viewpoint.
They paid the same for their onions as they had done for years.
“All polls are fought in the name of farmers, but the government policy clearly favors the consumers,” Dighole said.
India was yesterday voting in the seventh and final phase of a general election, stretched over six weeks to ease the logistical burden of polls in the world’s most populous country.
Two-thirds of India’s 1.4 billion people make their livelihoods from agriculture, accounting for nearly one-fifth of the country’s gross domestic product.
In India, onions can be a barometer of a government’s popularity.
Runaway prices have triggered mass protests and toppled governments in the past.
In 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who at the time was a local politician — lost control of the capital Delhi in state elections.
The defeat was widely blamed on voters’ anger at high onion prices.
While Modi is expected to sweep a third term in the national elections, the BJP has been out of power in the capital’s state legislature ever since.
Days before voting began in the onion belt of Nashik, Modi’s government lifted the export ban, but analysts called that a political ploy.
“The opening up of the onion market is nothing but rhetoric,” Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations economist Ashok Gulati said.
Gulati said restrictions remained — including a minimum export price and 40 percent duty — and made exports unviable, leaving farmers teary-eyed.
“Our best hope is to not sell for a loss,” 30-year-old farmer Akshay Tarle said at an onion auction, where lines of trailers piled high with the vegetable waited.
“When I leave home in the morning I don’t even know if I’ll be able to sell my produce at the right price,” 36-year-old farmer Vikas Babaji Tushare said. “My family ask me to buy things on my way back home, but there are days I don’t even have the money.”
“I don’t even know what to tell my children,” he added.
Gulati said that export bans and unchecked imports of other products such as lentils — a key staple and protein source for many — were distorting markets and hurting producers.
India’s import of pulses jumped to a six-year high of about US$3.75 billion between last year and now, according to commerce figures cited by Indian media.
“Duty-free import of pulses ... would dent the progress made in domestic production,” Gulati said. Yet some hope for change.
“People at the top fear that if onion prices rise, governments will fall,” said Jagannath Bhimaji Kute, 58, vice-president of a wholesale onion market in Nashik. “Whoever comes to power next will have to address our issues.”
Kute urged Indians to “think about the farmers,” asking why people swallowed rising prices on fuel and cooking oil, but not food.
“Why must what we produce remain cheap, when everything else is getting more expensive?” he said.
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