‘Tomato Trouble’: ‘Bouncers,’ free tomatoes with smartphones as prices surge across India

Morung Express News
Dimapur | July 10

As tomato prices continue to surge across India, particularly from the second half of June, vendors and consumers are resorting to unusual approaches to tide over the situation.

In Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi, a vegetable ‘vendor’ has reportedly hired bouncers to protect his stall and control customer behaviour due to the soaring prices.

The vegetable vendor Ajay Fauji said he was compelled to hire the bouncers as some customers become violent while buying tomatoes, reported the IANS news agency. 

“The tomato prices are too high and people become violent at times. They start arguing and even use bad language.

Since we do not want any trouble of disturbance at the shop, I have hired bouncers,” he was quoted as saying. 

However, there was political dimension to his actions with the PTI news agency describing the vendor as a Samajwadi Party Worker, the official opposition party of the Uttar Pradesh.

A video posted by the news agency highlighting this unusual approach went viral shortly after it was posted but later taken down on Twitter. 

However, there seems political dimension to his actions with the PTI describing the vendor as a Samajwadi Party Worker, the official opposition party of the Uttar Pradesh.

Meanwhile, PTI also posted another video on Sunday of a smartphone shop owner in Madhya Pradesh’s Ashok Nagar giving tomatoes to customers free of cost with mobile phones.

 “Since tomatoes have become expensive and we wanted to offer something to customers due to increased competition in the market, we decided to offer tomatoes with smartphones,” the shop owner Abhishek Agarwal said.

Even multinational companies are not immune to the surging tomato prices.  

In Delhi, McDonald issued a notice explaining the unavailability of tomatoes from their food items last week. According to IANS report on July 7, a notice posted outside the McDonald’s outlets in the national capital informed customer that despite their best efforts, they were unable to procure adequate quantities of tomatoes that met their stringent quality checks. 

As a result, McDonald’s was forced to serve products without tomatoes temporarily, with assurances to resolve the situation soon.

Meanwhile, the PTI reported that the fast-food chain has stopped using tomato in its food preparations at most of the stores in northern and eastern parts of the country citing the non-availability of quality products, amid the price of the commodity surging up to Rs 200 per kg.  

Several news outlets also reported last week that due to steep rise in the prices, farmers in Karnataka are forced to guard their tomatoes in their farm lands.  In Hassan district, a farmer has lodged a police complaint alleging that tomatoes worth Rs 3 lakh have been stolen overnight from his farm. 

Closer home, prices of tomatoes have ‘galloping’ since the second half of June.  

“We are reluctant to quote the price to consumers due to daily fluctuations,” a vegetable vendors in Chümoukedima told this newspaper in third week of June, when the price tomatoes ranged between Rs 60-80.

By July 1, the prices were in the Rs 100 threshold and on Saturday, when the market last opened, prices were touching Rs 140-150 in some locations.

While most Naga kitchens use bamboo shoots as alternative to tomatoes, the heatwaves or erratic rainfall effecting the harvest as well as supply of the highly perishable commodity getting affected usually due to the monsoon season, no respite is foreseeable till August.

Tomato-nomics: Why are prices surging?

What is causing the steep rise in tomato prices, and when can we expect them to decrease? A report titled “Economic Round-up: June 2023” by the Bank of Baroda (BOB), published on July 4, provides some insights.

According to the report, the average retail price of tomatoes increased by 38.5% in June 2023 compared to the previous period, and the wholesale prices rose by 45.3% during the same timeframe. 

The report attributed the price surge to a 0.4% decrease in tomato production, which declined from 20,694 (‘000 MT) in 2021-22 to 20,621 (‘000 MT) based on the first advance estimates of 2022-23.

State-wise data reveals that Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, and Odisha account for 51.5% of the total tomato production. In Gujarat, production has fallen by 23.9%, while Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh witnessed a production drop of -20%, it added. 

The report further highlighted that the Rabi harvest season for tomatoes spans from December to June and that the crop might have been affected by heatwaves or erratic rainfall, contributing to the sudden upward blip in prices.

However, with the arrival of the crop from July to November, some easing of the price trajectory is expected, it projected.
Citing historical data, the report indicated that the recent spike in prices is typically seasonal and often occurs in months such as June, September, and November, coinciding with the harvesting and arrival of the vegetable.

‘Our analysis suggests that the cycle of this unanticipated shocks are also short lived (4-5 months generally). Hence. with July-November arrival of crop, correction in prices might be seen in H2FY24 (Second Half of the Current Financail Year),’ it concluded.