Feeding Urban India

“Guava Guava buy fresh Guava of Mahabaleshwar” shouts a vendor in Pimpri Chinchwad, Maharashtra (India) [Image by Mahak Agrawal, 2019]

Strolling around Pimpri Chinchwad, a suburb of Pune city in the Indian state of Maharashtra, one can find scores of street vendors selling varieties of fruits and vegetables, each one trying to grab the attention of pedestrians with their display and holler. These fruits and vegetables are not produced within the city — more than 95 percent of the food isn’t — but the demand is.

Produced in the districts of Ahmednagar, Buldhana, Pune and Nashik, Maharashtra is the biggest producer of guava fruit in India, transporting the Peruvian fruit to different parts of the region. Despite the fruit’s short shelf life, it is also exported via traders to the markets of the United Arab Emirates, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Jordan, France, Sweden, Switzerland, amongst many others.

Ask any urban dweller in India: where does their food come from? Some would say Zomato (the Indian-based restaurant and delivery website). Others may say the kitchen. Some may say supermarkets. Rarely you’ll find a person saying that food comes from farms. It would be even more rare to find people who know their food supply chain well — from farms and wholesale markets, to retailers and kitchens. And even then, we tend to ignore the key figures in this supply chain: truck drivers.

A truck driver bides his time stuck in a traffic jam on the way from Jaipur to Chandigarh (Image by Ozzie Hoppe, 2015)

Rajat: I encountered in Andhra Pradesh a trio of truck drivers from Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh who explained to me the difference between transporting kaccha maal (perishable goods) and pakka maal (processed goods). Traveling long distances that bridge north and south of India, these truck drivers follow the broad logic as explained by one of the truckers:

“We transport pakka maal such as powder, clothes, soap, chemicals from north to south and pick up kaccha maal such as ginger, sweet lime, and tomatoes on the way back. Our seth [1] has contacts with commission agents across the country. He tells us where to go. Our job is only to drive”

Just a few days back, these drivers had transported apple from Delhi in the north to Rajahmundry in the south, and were on their way to Anantapur district in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to pick up tomatoes which they planned to deposit in Dehradun in north India. For drivers, however, the kaccha maal offers a better deal than pucca maal. They get a chance to earn an inaam (or prize) if they manage to transport it in time, as narrated by one of the drivers:  

"If we manage to transport the tomatoes within five days, our pay will be topped up by three thousand rupees. It'll only take us two days though. Our truck is new so it shoots like a horse. And since it's the three of us, one of us is always driving, even if others are resting."

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In essence, it is a truck driver who brings fruits, vegetables and other food crops from the farms to our kitchens. How? Well, there are different functional modes for this chain. In simple terms, a farmer produces a crop, and takes it to a mandi (wholesale market) located in urban or peri-urban areas of India, where the produce is then auctioned off by commissioning agents of the state-run Agricultural Produce Market Committee [2]. This produce is then bought off by a few buyers, who sell it off to local retailers and vendors that we find in our neighbourhood markets.

But the supply chain isn’t always this simple.

A truck winds through the restive Naga Hills in north-east India (Image by Ozzie Hoppe, 2015)

There are several players in this chain, and it varies with the type and scale of produce and market demand. For example, a small farmer often transports the produce to a mandi for auction by themselves. Sometimes, a middleman buys off produce from multiple small farmers and transports it from one district of a state to the most accessible — access in terms of distance, market price and contacts with commissioning agents — mandi. For large farmers, there may be one or many middlemen who buy their produce directly from farm at prices lower than the prices at which it is auctioned off in the mandi. In several instances, a middleman may buy a farm or orchard, and sell off the produce via mandi, where the farmer becomes an agricultural labourer. There are numerous variations of the farm-to-city food supply chain in India, but one thing remains common across all the variations: it is the truck drivers who travel hundreds and thousands of kilometres to bring food from farms to our plates every day.

Long, winding traffic jams stretching for kilometres are a regular sight on the single-lane NH44 connecting Jammu to Srinagar, the only road that connects Kashmir Valley to the rest of the country. Jammu and Kashmir is key producer of apples in India. The famous ‘Kashmiri’ apples are a delicacy enjoyed by millions in the Gangetic plains situated south of Jammu and Kashmir (Image by Ozzie Hoppe, 2015)

Rajat: On the way from Mumbai to Delhi, I remember a truck zooming past us with ‘Vegetable Express’ written across its back. When I asked my companion Rajinder why it's called Express, he explained:

"That's because these vegetable mandi trucks are the fastest of the lot. They cover the distance between Delhi and Bombay within a day. Ekdum Rajdhani ki tarah (Just like the famous Rajdhani express train). The drivers even eat at the steering wheel. Near Udaipur, a person waits for them with dinner. They don't have the time to go to dhabas[3]. When one guy eats, the other drives. It's a non-stop journey for these guys. In fact, the owner of the truck hands over twice the amount for diesel expenses since they drive at inefficient speeds to get the truck there on time. For all this hard work, they get an inaam or prize (3000-4000 INR or 40-55 USD) at the end. It' a lot of money if you think about it."

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It is true that truck drivers travel hundreds and thousands of miles to bring food from farm to our cities, but is this sustainable? The answer is not a simple yes or no.

Globally, cities’ spatial extent, population and demand for food are rising, and will continue to increase exponentially. India, for instance, is home to 1.38 billion persons. Nearly 35 percent of this billion plus population lives in ~8,000 cities and towns of varied shapes, sizes and functions. This percentage of urban population meets its food demands from agriculture produced in the rural and peri-urban areas. The skewed distribution — and growth — of population inclined towards urban, rather than rural, areas raise concerns of food security, and how rural areas can augment production, as well as manage processing and distribution to cater to both urban and rural demand.

In the late 1990s, the concept of urban agriculture gained traction worldwide. Discussions on the value of urban agriculture or urban farming, in response to food security and reduction of poverty, grew. But urban farming has been a common practice — of supplementing rural food production and promoting water conservation — throughout the evolution of human settlements. It is not a modern concept.

After 2002, the ‘Eat Local’ or ‘locavore’ movement gained popularity and continues to be popular in select geographies and demographic groups. But the movement has been often criticised as an elitist movement benefiting cafes, restaurants and select small farmers rather than serve its original purpose of promoting urban farming and eating food produced in urban and/or peri-urban areas.

From 2008 on, dialogues and discussions on urban agriculture expanded to include dimensions of sustainability, climate change, livelihood, and land policies, apart from poverty and food security. In terms of climate crisis, a plethora of scientific experiments and research indicate a decline in agriculture productivity and output with changing climate. A rule of thumb states that a 1-degree Celsius rise of temperature reduces crop yields by 10 per cent. From a sustainability perspective, urban agriculture can help augment food demand whilst addressing inequalities of access, and challenges of hunger, malnutrition, migration, resource-intensive production, distribution and consumption.

Urbanists and crop scientists have been working in their own fields for decades to experiment with urban farming. Urbanists’ experimentation revolves around planning, policies, design and architecture, while crop scientists and agriculture specialists’ experiment with genes of crops and seeds that can survive and support urban demands amidst decreasing agriculture producers and cultivable area.

In the past few years, several architecture and design firms across the world have joined the urban agriculture movement, and are incorporating urban farming into the built environment. For instance, Riverpark Farm in New York, designed by ORE Design + Technology, is Manhattan’s largest (and entirely mobile) urban farm, which uses unconventional spaces and technologies for crop harvesting in a densely populated urban ecosystem. While it does not really augment the city’s food demand, it exhibits a way forward. In another example from Vietnam, actions and initiatives to incorporate urban agriculture in the urban fabric are cropping up. AgriNesture is one such project by H&P Architects that aims to augment housing demand, while simultaneously promoting agriculture and creating jobs for local residents.

But is this enough to even make a dent in demand?

Experiences from the past and present have shown that urban agriculture has not had a significant impact when it comes to urban food security or urban food demand. But that does not mean that it cannot in the future. In fact, the experiences indicate that:

1. Urban farming is possible, even in densely populated areas.

2. There is market demand for urban farming, which has the potential to grow in the near future.

3. Urban farming can be an effective move towards urban food security, if — and only if — all the stakeholders in the urban food ecosystem see a value or incentive with urban farming that helps further key stakeholders’ bottom line.

Be it sunrise or sunset, a truck driver never stops. (Image by Ozzie Hoppe, 2015)

To truly realise the potentials of urban agriculture, which is already practiced by >800 million persons across the world, it is essential for planners, policymakers, designers, etc. to work with stakeholders engaged in the farm-to-city food chain, and develop multi-pronged measures — relating to its legal, institutional, policy-driven, technological, and informational aspects — that link together for effective urban agriculture. 

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Mahak Agrawal is a medical candidate turned urban planner, exploring innovative, implementable, impactful solutions for pressing urban-regional challenges in her diverse works. In different capacities, Mahak has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Town and Country Planning Organization, Government of India, Institute of Transport Economics, Oslo, to name a few. In 2019, she founded The Spatial Perspectives as an enterprise that uses the power of visual storytelling and open data to dismantle myths and faulty perspectives associated with spaces around the world. Based out of India, Mahak spends spare time to experiment and create sustainable art works which showcase cultural heritage of India.

Rajat Ubhaykar is the author of the critically acclaimed travelogue Truck de India: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Hindustan based on his 10,000 km-long journeys across India hitchhiking with truck drivers, published by Simon & Schuster in October 2019. He trained as an electrical engineer at IIT Kanpur, and went on to study journalism at the Asian College of Journalism after a stint in management consulting. A recipient of the PoleStar Award in 2016 for his reportage, his work has appeared in publications such as Mint, Outlook Business, Roads & Kingdoms, and Madras Courier. He lives in Mumbai, and spends his spare time reviewing books, collecting trivia, and exploring India's archaeological sites.

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[1] ‘Seth’ is a Hindi term for boss

[2] Agricultural Produce (and Livestock) Market Committee or APMC is a marketing board established by a state government in India under the provisions of APLM Act to ensure farmers are safeguarded from exploitation by large retailers, as well as ensuring the farm to retail price spread does not reach excessively high levels.

[3] small restaurants situated along national highways in India catering to truck drivers and more