Mumbai: Soaring onion prices are the talk of town not only in India but also in Bangladesh and Pakistan, where meals sans the staple are rare. The retail price in India, now in the higher three digits per kg, has made them unaffordable to the poor and a large section of the lower middle-class.
Many consumers have already sacrificed the vegetable from their daily diet on the hopes that the government will intervene and bring prices back to normal. But, to their dismay, prices of the staple are unlikely to come down anytime soon, even with government agencies importing onions.
Trade officials expect the prices to rise by another 20-25% from the current all-time highs as arrivals are not expected until mid-January or end-February.
This is because the durable and good quality summer crop, also called kharif onion, is over and the new late-kharif crop will start reaching the markets only in the second or third week of January.
"Supply of the new crop from late kharif plantation will start only from mid-January. We will see some moderation in prices, probably from early January at the earliest," said Suvarna Jagtap, chairman of the Agricultural Produce Market Committee in Lasalgaon, the benchmark trading centre for onion in Nashik district.
Wholesale prices of onions, which started rising late in July from as low as Rs 20 a kg, touched Rs 120 per kg earlier this week as stocks of summer or rabi crop are over and the new kharif crop supply is lower by 40-70% from state to state, depending on the extent of damage caused to the crop from excessive rains that lasted until first week of November.
Today, poor quality onion was sold at Rs 4,200 per 100 kg in Lasalgaon, down 42% from Thursday's record high of Rs 7,500, and at Rs 5,251 per 100 kg in Pimpalgaon, from 38% down Thursday. Good quality onion was sold at Rs 8,800 per 100 kg in Pimpalgaon, down 30% from Thursday's record high of Rs 12,601.
But the irony is that even onion farmers are facing the brunt of the surge in prices, as the unprecedented supply crunch has started forcing them to buy the vegetable from the open market.
