Rotten Bananas in a Scorching India Expose Climate's Food Cost bnnbloomberg.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bnnbloomberg.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
India is the worlds largest producer of bananas, which are highly perishable. To keep fruit cool on the journey, theyre covered with leaves during transit. Its far from a solution: India lost 1.53 trillion rupees ($18.4 billion) of food in fiscal year 2020-21, about a fifth of that from spoilt fruit.
Early each morning in the Indian city of Bhubaneswar, wholesaler Gadadhara Mohanty waits anxiously for trucks carrying bananas to a food market from a few hundred kilometers away.
India wastes nearly 80 million tons of food at the retail and consumer level, second only to China. As climate changes exacerbates extreme heat, the numbers are likely to worsen in South Asia, one of the most vulnerable regions to rising temperatures.