Category: Vegetables

A quick follow-up to our post a couple of days back on the price of onions in India. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal, no less, weighed in on the subject, with a reference to a report commissioned by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to get to the bottom of…

…volatility of onion prices and its relationship with distribution in the what the CCI described as a “loose and casual market.”

According to one of the authors, quoted by the WSJ:

There is almost an oligopoly kind of situation and until there are multiple players, the price will be dictated by a few traders.

So it’s all down to those pesky middlemen, it seems. Farmers have no chance:

Farmers generally take reference of the local markets’ rates, while traders compare rates of all markets, including major distant and export markets and then decide where to send their produce

Ah, but wait. There’s also news of a World Bank pilot project to crowdsource price data on agricultural commodities which may solve that little problem. Here’s the onion data from last year. ((Thanks to Tariq Khokhar for the help in tracking this down.)) I’m not sure whether in due course we’ll also have this year’s, and thus be able to see that 200% year-on-year increase in July mentioned by the WSJ.

I guess the real challenge is to get these numbers out in real time, and in a way that farmers can make use of. There’s clearly a way to go:

What did we learn? The results from the pilot tell us that, yes, the crowd can collect reliable and timely prices – but you need to provide incentives and implement good verification and validation processes. The resulting data are comparable over time and space, and timeliness is pretty good — the time lag is only about a month. And, importantly, the resulting data are open to all users.

A good start, no doubt, but I’m not sure that a month after the event is going to be of much use to farmers. Other similar efforts are underway, though, so maybe one of these “thousand points of light” will emerge as a bit brighter than the others. After all, if weather, why not prices?

Why is this important for agricultural biodiversity? Well, for a start, markets have been touted as the saviours of neglected and underutilized crops, and maybe even landraces of the more successful and overused sort. Wouldn’t do if they were “loose and casual”, now would it?

Meanwhile, can we have the same for fish?

I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the current precarious state of the Indian economy, but there are quite a few stories doing the rounds on the high prices of agricultural commodities in that country. Just today there were pieces on onions and on guar, which is the legume Cyamopsis tetragonoloba, whose gum has a role in fracking. But this onions business is nothing new. I am sure I remember similar panics in past years, and not just in 2011, which is the only search peak Google reveals:

Anyway, just for the hell of it, I waded into FAOSTAT’s onion price data for India and a couple of neighbouring countries, and this is what I got:

Some fluctuations, yes, but not much evidence or price spikes, surely. But why all that missing data from India (the red line)? Let the conspiracy theorizing begin!