The humble tomato gets its revenge
NEW DELHI : For farmers in India, growing tomatoes is a gamble. A risk which pays off once in a blue moon. For instance, as tomato prices surged past ₹200 a kg last week, the steepest ever the national capital region has seen, Ishwar Gaykar, a grower from Pune, Maharashtra, made a fortune from his 12 acres of tomato crop.
Gaykar’s profit for the current season is already ₹2.4 crore, Bloomberg reported. But closer to Delhi, Ramesh Panghal from Haryana, a farmer planting tomatoes in over 50 acres, had no produce to sell. In April, Panghal ran a tractor through his field, destroying the ripe harvest after farm gate prices dipped to a low of ₹2-3 per kg.
The prices were so low it did not make sense to hire workers to harvest the crop and transport it to a wholesale market in Delhi or Chandigarh. Panghal lost close to ₹9 lakh in one season, between planting in December and harvesting in March-April. For eight straight months leading up to the summer of 2023, farmers sold tomatoes at ₹2-5 per kg.
This is much lower than the production cost of at least ₹8 per kg, Panghal said over phone from his village in Haryana’s Bhiwani district. “Most farmers in my area destroyed their harvest. I ploughed down 3,500 quintals.
Between these frequent large losses, a farmer waits for a time when he can cash in on a price spike. An assured price of ₹12 per kg will reduce the risks for us," Pangal added. Average all-India retail price of tomatoes surged to ₹119 per kg on 16 July, shows data collected by the consumer affairs ministry.
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