The shifting sands of food prices

livemint.com:

Mandsaur/Ujjain: From a distance, the field appeared like a post-impressionist landscape. Shades of yellowish green on a patchy canvas of charred brown. 19-year-old Kamlesh, a skinny college student, uprooted a soybean plant and crushed a few pods with his fingers.

The beans inside were discoloured—pale and pockmarked instead of the smooth yellow, much smaller than their usual size and fewer in numbers per pod—the consequence of a prolonged dry spell which began in August and lasted for over a month. The beans were ready for harvest but would yield less than a fifth of a normal crop. They will sell at a discount in the wholesale market and not even pay for the labour costs of harvest.

A while ago, he sat next to his elder sister, Pooja, on a rough cement floor inside a bare room lined with naked bricks. Their unfinished house, which is yet to get the final coat of plaster and paint, is in Barod village in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh. Pooja, 23, struggled to hold back her tears as she clasped a framed photograph of her father.

Her voice quivered as she spoke. Kamlesh was quiet. After graduating from college, Pooja was preparing for a position in the state police department.

Her father, 45-year-old Jagdish Dhangar, was worried the family did not have enough money to get Pooja married. Five acres of soybean were lost to a drought. There were debts to repay.

On the evening of 4 September, Dhangar had tea and stepped out of home. The family kept looking for him through the night and found him at the farm, next morning. He had hung himself from a mango tree.