From the farm to the global shelf: Why India must move beyond yields

INDIA PRODUCES more milk than any country on earth. It is among the top growers of rice, pulses, spices, sugarcane, and cotton. Walk through any wholesale market, and the abundance is visible. And yet, when global agricultural trade was tallied at the end of 2024, India’s share came to just 2.2%, according to WTO data. For a country of this productive scale, this number is underwhelming. The export numbers tell a similarly sobering story. Agricultural exports stood at $52.5 billion in FY23, slipped to $48.1 billion in FY24, and recovered partially to $51.2 billion in FY25. That three-year arc, a peak, a fall, and an incomplete recovery, is not the trajectory of a country systematically building global agricultural competitiveness. For decades, the response has been to grow more. More tonnes per hectare, more records, more acreages. But that instinct is hitting a wall. Soils are degrading. Water tables are falling. Input costs keep climbing, and the average farm size keeps shrinking. The Green Revolution answered the question of how much India could produce. The question it left unanswered is what happens to the crop after harvest. The margin lives downstream Brazil did not become an agricultural superpower simply by growing soya bean. It built the crushing plants, the logistics corridors, the port infrastructure, and the entire downstream architecture that transforms a raw commodity into a globally traded product with real pricing power. Thailand is an even sharper example. Nigeria grows more cassava than anyone. Thailand exports more cassava products than anyone, commanding over 60% of the global market, because it converts the crop into starch, ethanol, and animal feed that hundreds of countries depend on. Thailand understood something Brazil understood, too. Bulk commodity exports are a race to the bottom on price, while value-added exports are a race to the top on margin. India is yet to make the transition in any meaningful way. A tightening world The cost of that delay is rising. Import standards globally are no longer just about tariffs. Europe is enforcing stricter residue limits. Sustainability-linked procurement requirements are becoming standard. Traceability mandates now demand full visibility from field to shelf, and Indian exporters have faced rejections at foreign ports precisely because the quality assurance, documentation, and provenance systems weren’t in place. The proposed India-EU Free Trade Agreement illustrates the stakes clearly. Preferential access to over 90% of tariff lines means little if Indian produce keeps failing on sanitary and phytosanitary standards and technical barriers to trade. Significantly, the Economic Survey 2025-26, prepared by Chief Economic Adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran, has explicitly flagged the same structural fault lines, like inadequate processing facilities, infrastructure bottlenecks, and regulatory hurdles, that continue to suppress India’s agricultural export potential. When the government’s own pre-Budget economic assessment is identifying these constraints as a drag on growth, it is a signal that the problem is both well-understood and still unresolved. The world, meanwhile, does not extend trust easily, especially towards commodities. It extends it to brands, certifications, and a track record of consistency. Japanese rice, French cheese, and Colombian coffee are not marketing constructs but the accumulated result of process discipline, quality systems, and decades of deliberate reputation-building. Indian agriculture needs to do the same, one crop and one market at a time. The integration problem India’s small and marginal farmers, the vast majority of the agricultural workforce, remain almost entirely disconnected from downstream value creation. They grow the crop, bring it to the mandi, and sell it raw at whatever price the market offers that week. They bear the full volatility of the supply chain and capture the thinnest slice of its value. A spice leaving a farm in Kerala at a few hundred rupees per kg can retail on a European supermarket shelf at 20 times that price, packed and branded by someone else entirely. Closing that gap is not fundamentally an infrastructure problem. Cold storage and better roads help, but they don’t solve the issue. The real problem is one of integration, where farmers are not treated as merely raw material suppliers when they need to be stakeholders in the chain. It also requires contract farming frameworks that offer price visibility and quality targets upfront. Meanwhile, input systems need to be calibrated not just for yield but for the specific grades that processors and export markets actually demand and aggregation models that allow small holders to present collectively to large buyers. The path forward The good news is that India does not need to start from scratch. It needs to concentrate. Sectorally integrated clusters, a turmeric processing hub in Nizamabad (in Telangana), a marine food corridor along the Odisha coast, and a mango pulp belt in Maharashtra create the conditions where cold chains, processing units, quality labs, and logistics reinforce each other in the same geography. Clusters lower coordination costs, attract specialised capital, and build the critical mass that makes export-grade consistency achievable. They also give industry a coherent proposition around which to pull together farmers, financial institutions, technology providers, and regulatory frameworks. At the farm level, precision nutrition, certified seed systems, and responsible crop protection practices reduce chemical loads, improve produce uniformity, and build the traceability that international buyers now treat as a baseline requirement, not a premium. Policy is pointing in the right direction — PLI schemes for food processing, the PM FME programme, and the One District One Product framework are all useful instruments. But policy creates the runway. Industry investment and institutional innovation have to make the plane take off. The architecture of India’s agricultural value chains is being built right now, and the decisions made over the next five to seven years — where clusters are located, what processing capacities are created, and which standards are adopted — will shape India’s position in global agricultural trade for the next two decades. (Views are personal.)

From the farm to the global shelf: Why India must move beyond yields

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