India's mango paradox

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:01)
Once upon a time, at a gathering in Delhi, Mirza Ghalib, arguably the greatest Urdu poet that ever lived, was asked a very important question.
What are the qualities that a mango should have? His answer became one of the most quoted things that he ever said about anything, apart from heartbreak of course.
Mangos, said Ghalib, need only two things. They should be sweet, and they should be in plenty.
From poetry to annual dinner table arguments about which variety is the best, mangoes are woven into the fabric of Indian life in a way that no other fruit comes close to.
I myself am partial to Langra, though millions would argue for Alfonso, the export superstar. In the UK this season, a box of Alfonso's was selling for nearly 20 pounds, a price that the farmer who grew it would find hard to believe.
This year, those same farmers reported losses of up to 90%, and among the worst harvests in living memory. Extreme heat had disrupted Alfonso's flowering at exactly the worst moment. So the fruit simply did not set. And this was just the beginning of one of the worst years for Indian mangoes.
In May, Japan suspended all Indian mango imports. A single treatment facility in Uttar Pradesh had failed a biosecurity inspection. And Japan, which requires its own inspectors to physically certify each batch, closed the entire season's market for every exporter in the country. And then, just earlier this week, Nepal sent Indian mango shipments back to the border. The reason was inspectors found excessive pesticide residues in the fruit itself. Meanwhile, the war in Iran had already tripled air transport costs and effectively shut down the Gulf route, where the bulk of India's fresh mango exports go. In London, for example, a stall holder who has sold Alfonso's in Tooting Market for 24 years told the BBC that normally, at this time of the year, London's high streets are flooded with them. This year, it's different. Now, here is the number that puts all of this in context. India produces nearly half of the world's mangoes, over 24 million metric tons a year. But it exports only around 30,000 tons of fresh fruit. Of every 1,000 mangoes basically that are grown in this country, roughly one or two leave it as fresh fruit.
To be fair, India does export significant volumes of mango pulp. But pulp is not what commands 19 to 20 pounds a box in London. The fresh market is where the ambition lies. And that is precisely where India keeps losing ground. So why does a country that grows half of the world's mangoes, keeps getting shut out of market after market?
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 11th of June.
Let's start with what India could not control. The Alfonso Crop failure was climate change. The Gulf route closure was geopolitics. But what happened with Japan and Nepal deserves a closer look. You see, every year before the season opens, Japan sends a team of quarantine inspectors to India to oversee something called Vapor Heat Treatment or VHD, which is a non-chemical process that exposes mangoes to hot, saturated air. The idea is to kill any fruit fly eggs or larvae inside without damaging the flesh. Japan, the EU, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Mauritius all require VHD as a condition of import. Japan has required it since 2006 when it lifted a ban on Indian mangoes that had lasted 20 years. India built dedicated facilities across five states specifically to win back that access and to serve all those markets simultaneously. This March, inspectors arrived at a facility in Rehmanpur, Uttar Pradesh and found deficiencies in fumigation and disinfection. What followed was pretty immediate. The Oklahoma Plant Protection Association announced that all Indian mango shipments certified after the 25th of March would not be accepted.
All of this points to a coordination failure that stretches back to years. India's record export to Japan was just 70 tons in 2011 to 2012 For comparison, Pakistan, with a fraction of India's production volume, nearly doubled in a single season by 2019
So after 2012, India's Japan exports kind of collapsed and never really recovered. So this ban just seems to be the natural outcome of over a decade of institutional neglect of a market that India had actually worked hard to win back. Now while Japan ban is about how India processes its mangoes after harvest, the Nepal rejection is about what goes into them before.