2015 Volume 66 Issue 3 Pages 176-192
Since the late 1990s, there has been much focus on the development of horticultural trade between African and European countries and the impact on exporters. This could be likened to a kind of food chain linking developed and developing nations. This article explores India’s horticultural exports to examine whether the bilateral relations between African and European countries is similar to that between the Indian Ocean Rim and European countries. Changes in the country-wise and commodity-wise horticultural exports during the 2000s were examined using statistics of the Indian Horticulture Database provided by the National Horticulture Board, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India.
Important findings include an increase in fresh fruit and vegetable exports, especially fresh onions, and an expansion of the share of exports to the South Asian countries, especially Bangladesh. At the end of the 1990s, processed fruit and vegetables, especially dried and preserved vegetables, were the major export commodities, with the major destinations being European and Middle Eastern countries. However, the share in export value of these two commodities relative to that of the major commodities in major countries shrank from 60% in 2002 to 40% in 2010. Conversely, the South Asian countries came to the forefront with shares in these commodities more than doubling. In 2010 the share in export value of the South Asian countries had come closest to paralleling that of the European countries and the share in export volume exceeded that of the European countries, reaching almost five times in quantity. From the viewpoint of export items, the amount of dried and preserved vegetables—the leading item until 2000—had declined during this decade, although the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables almost quadrupled during this period. The major destinations of these fresh commodities were the South Asian countries. Although their prices were cheaper than those of floriculture, walnuts, and processed commodities, their export volume became a considerable amount of the horticultural trade of India.
These exports of fresh commodities to Asian countries were substantially different from the above-mentioned recent horticultural trade between African and European countries. One point of difference was between the exports to developing and developed nations. The recent expansion of India’s exports to developing nations and South Asian countries is characterized by low prices but a large volume of fresh commodities. Previous studies on exports to European countries characterized these by higher prices but relatively low quantity. This pattern was also remarkable from the context of economic development of the Indian Ocean Rim. As shown in a case study of the Indian domestic food chain (Araki 2013), the expansion of fresh vegetables in urban markets had a large impact on remote rural villages shipping commodities to market, also resulting in a spillover effect on lower economic strata of the village, such as agricultural labor. Evaluation of the impact of exports to developing and developed nations from India, itself a developing nation in South Asia, is significant from the perspective of rural and agricultural development in this region.
