India’s export ban makes wheat cheap – hurting farmers already reeling from extreme heat

Indian farmers and traders are angry they’ve been denied a windfall as domestic prices plummeted while values on US and European exchanges hit all-time highs

With wheat now at the government-set minimum price in India, the slump represents the difference between a bumper payout and heartache, farmers say

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A farmer stands in his wheat field, which was damaged by unseasonal rains, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Photo: Reuters

Published: 4:02pm, 22 May 2022

When New Delhi banned wheat exports as prices soared over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine it provoked consternation abroad and drove the cereal even higher.

Now Indian farmers and traders are fuming they have been denied a windfall as domestic prices have plummeted.

India is the world’s second-biggest wheat producer, but the government – itself the country’s biggest buyer of the crop – said it chose to protect food security for its mammoth population despite inflation concerns.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As late as last month he had offered to help plug the global wheat deficit and ‘feed the world’. Then came India’s export ban. Photo: EPA-EFE

The move – along with dwindling global supplies from Russia and Ukraine, both among the world’s top five wheat exporters – sent prices to all-time highs on commodity exchanges in Chicago and Europe.

But at Asia’s largest grain market in Khanna, in India’s breadbasket state of Punjab, values went the other way.

Every year, thousands of farmers from the wheat-growing region sell their produce at the facility, which is dominated by a dozen giant storage sheds, each the size of a football pitch.