India’s tomato market continues to remain volatile due to extreme weather conditions such as drought and deluge. This has led to unprecedented price volatility, with tomato prices surging over 300% in certain regions. The urgency to address this crisis is evident as the retail prices soared to over Rs 200 per kilogram in a short span in the last few weeks, hitting the consumers hard. Sometimes, the market prices hit the abyss in some parts of the country to below Re 1 per kg, heavily impacting farmers’ profitability.
India, ranking second in the world, produces over 20 million tonnes (in 2022) of tomatoes grown on 8.4 lakh hectares with an average productivity of around 24.5 tonnes per hectare. For several decades, the Indian government has undertaken several initiatives, such as promoting the use of high-yielding varieties and hybrids, modern agricultural practices like protected cultivation and micro irrigation, investing in irrigation infrastructure, and encouraging post-harvest management and value addition.
Yet, the current tomato crisis in India highlights the urgency to explore innovative solutions beyond the ordinary. By focusing on research and development, tomato crop productivity can be improved significantly, which will help stabilize prices and alleviate distress for farmers and consumers alike. Without sustained investments in R&D on cutting-edge technology-aided plant breeding, similar crises can occur in any crop anytime, and all it needs is just one bad monsoon to set a vicious cycle in motion.
New breeding technologies (NBTs), with their remarkable capabilities, offer a ray of hope. For example, CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a promising gene-editing tool, holds immense potential to enhance agronomical traits like pest & disease resistance, extend shelf life, and boost productivity, stabilize prices and enhance fruit quality, and emerged as a game-changer in tomato breeding, as highlighted in a study by Wang, T., Zhang, H. & Zhu, H. (2019).
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