The enigmatic absence of the Alphonso

Walking across the farms one learns various ways of measuring the failure of mango crop, from the number of bags that a farmers could export to the sorry state of the local children’s stock of fresh green mangoes this year! These are justtwo indicators of the general despair that the Alphonso’s disappearance has caused in this region. It is generally accepted that this year’s yield is not even 25 per cent of that of a "normal year".

Explains Arvind Sawant, the vice-chancellor of the Konkan Agricultural University, "The Alphonso is a thermo-sensitive fruit. Our 50 years of data shows that there never was such a climatic variation in the region as we are presently witnessing," he says. He wonders why the climate has changed so drastically. There is a lurking doubt everybody here seems to be harbouring, although they seem hesitant to speak about it openly — has the growing air and water pollution in the Konkan region affected its most well-known produce?

When we ask Sawant whether the burgeoning chemical plants in Ratnagiri has anything to do with the poor harvest, he is non-committal. "We had suggested several studies on the agro-environmental aspects, but we are being told that it is none of our business," he says. But he believes that ithas become very important to collect more data on the phenomenon and scientifically analyse it.

B.P. Patil, an agro-meteorologist and the professor in the university, explains the relation between climatic changes and the mango harvest. In mid-November last year, when the cashew started flowering, the mango trees continued to wait for the temperature to drop further. A couple of weeks later the temperature dropped below 13 degrees and the mango flowers started appearing. The spell of low minimum temperature, however, did not last long enough for this process of flowering to be completed, he says.

What was worse was that this was followed by three days of continuous rain this January. The downpour played havoc with the temperature regime. Soon after the rain, the temperature started rising once again, severely damaging the mango flowers in the process. But by the end of February, there was a sudden drop in the temperature once again, which sparked off a second flush of flowering. The second flush, however,was not commercially useful since it was way behind in the climatic cycle. Within ten days’ time the temperature started rising once again, which meant that that even the second flush could not be sustained for fruiting to take place, even as the first flush was nearly destroyed.

In fact, the monsoon had also behaved very erratically last year. Patil has superimposed the 1997 average rainfall chart with another chart showing a moving average of 25 years of rainfall in the region and the difference is more than visible. Grappling with hundreds of charts, Patil observes that "the trend is clear… the frequency of below normal rainfall is on the increase".

Professor M. Kurondkarm, who has specialised in the mango crop, looks at climatic change this way — on an average the Konkan region has about 65 nights with minimum temperatures conducive for the flowering of mango trees but this year the number of cold nights was just 14.

He further points out that for the last several years the high yield inAlphonso mangoes was chemically induced. The practice of using Cultar, a trade name for a chemical known as paclobutrazol, had rekindled farmers’ interest in cultivating the Alphonso about five years ago, after many had switched over to the cashew.

After Kurondkar’s successful experiments, the agricultural university had recommended the application of Cultar for an adult mango tree every year in the month of July and August. It is meant to retard the "excessive" vegetative growth of a mango tree and divert its energy towards reproductive growth. It simply means that the application of the chemical would make a tree grow more fruits than leaves.

However, the soil pays the price for the use of this additive, since it results in the depletion of its mineral quality. The remedy, of course, is to add more fertilisers. Kurondkar confirms this, "Having applied Cultar, the farmers need to double the quantity of chemical fertilisers to maintain the same level of productivity. All the farmers who applied Cultardid not seem to have done this."

Clearly, the farmers are caught in a vicious circle — a higher yield and chemical fertilisers push the ecological balance of the soil to the brink. In fact, J.C. Rajput, an agricultural researcher wonders why there has been such an obsession with the Alphonso. He says that there are several other varieties of mango, both natural and hybrid, which can match the Alphonso in quality. In the subcontinent, there are an estimated 1,300 varieties of mangoes, of which only 20 or so have a commercial value. What happens, in the process, is the gross neglect of India’s valuable bio-diversity in mangoes.

Basket case

Ratnagiri, the home of the Alphonso, is obviously reeling under the crop failure of it famed mango produce. Both sides of the streets leading to the main market are overflowing with baskets made of bamboo, which are generally used for packaging the ripe crop. The anxious eyes of the basket vendors, who have been camping on the footpath for over a month now,suggest that the Alphonso crisis this year affects more than just the mango cultivator: ancillary industries, like basket-making, is also badly hit.

Jayawant Vaghmare, a basket-maker, had bought bamboo to make about 5,000 baskets over a period of two months. But to date he has made only 1,000 baskets and sold just a little over 300. He is worried just like his neighbour in the market, who sells rice straw which is also used for packaging. On a hot and dusty afternoon, the straw-seller was sleeping in the shade of a straw mountain which he had thought he could have quickly sold.

Says Dayanand Lad, who drives a mini truck to transport vegetables and fruits: "For several years the Ratnagiri market was sending a minimum of 2,000 packs of Alphonso to the markets of Mumbai."