996 Kilograms of Mandarins: Why the North East Grows So Much and Exports So Little

On 14 November 2024, 996 kilograms of Khasi Mandarin left Meghalaya for Dubai. Just under a tonne — roughly what fits in the back of a pickup.

It was a genuine achievement, and it should be said plainly before anything else. Somebody found a buyer in the Gulf willing to try an Indian mandarin they had never heard of. Somebody got the fruit graded and certified, kept it cold from a Ri-Bhoi orchard to an aircraft hold, and cleared it through customs at both ends. None of that is easy from Shillong, and it had not been done before.

Four more shipments followed over that winter. Eight thousand lemons and fifteen hundred kilograms of pumpkins went from Sivasagar in upper Assam to Dubai in December. Five lakh mandarin oranges crossed into Bangladesh in January. Two hundred kilograms of dried Dalle chilli travelled from Sikkim to the Solomon Islands in February, which is about as far as a Himalayan chilli has ever gone. And on 25 February, fifteen tonnes of organic ginger from Ri-Bhoi sailed for Dubai — the first time ginger from the region had been sent by sea rather than air.

Those five consignments are the North East's export year, as told by the agency whose job it is to tell it well. Set them beside what the region harvested in the same twelve months and the story stops being about what left and starts being about what stayed.

In 2024-25 the eight states grew 4.86 million tonnes of fruit and 6.68 million tonnes of vegetables — near enough 11.5 million tonnes between them, on the agriculture ministry's Final Estimates. The vegetable side includes potato, 1.25 million tonnes of it, nearly 800,000 tonnes in Assam alone.

Assam carries more than half the region's harvest. Tripura, a state you could drive across in a morning, grows more fruit and vegetables than Meghalaya and Nagaland together.

This is not a region short of produce, and it is not a region short of the right produce either. Much of it is organic by default, because smallholders here never took to heavy fertiliser in the first place. The orchards run from temperate to tropical inside a few hundred kilometres. Every consultant's report for thirty years has opened with some version of that paragraph.

What almost none of it does is leave the country. Everything the eight states shipped abroad last year — tea, limestone, plywood, produce, all of it together — came to USD 629.6 million, on an Exim Bank study published in Guwahati this June. The study is blunt about the composition: the basket is "highly concentrated, driven largely by tea", and farm output is "majorly absorbed within the domestic market than being exported, primarily owing to infrastructural constraints."

How much of that 629.6 was fruit and vegetables, nobody publishes. The last figure anyone put on the region's farm exports was USD 17.2 million, and that was for 2021-22.

Here is the part that is genuinely hard to explain to a farmer in Agartala.

Bangladesh is the biggest customer for India's fresh vegetables anywhere in the world. It took 28% of them last year, well ahead of the UAE at 15% and Malaysia at 8%. It buys Indian fruit too, though less — about 6%, behind Iraq, the UAE and the Netherlands.

The North East has 5,182 kilometres of international border, and the longest share of it is with Bangladesh. Tripura has that border on three sides; from Agartala you can see it. Yet the tomatoes and onions and potatoes that India sells into Dhaka are trucked out of West Bengal, from fields hundreds of kilometres further away from the buyer than a Tripura farm.

Some trade does cross. Five lakh oranges went from Assam into Bangladesh in January, and informal movement across the border haats has gone on for as long as the border has. But a consignment is not a supply line. An importer in Dhaka planning next season needs to know that eighty tonnes will arrive every Tuesday at a known grade and a known price. Nothing in the region can promise that yet, so nobody asks it to.

Two economists went looking for the pattern in all this a couple of years ago — Madhuchhanda Dasgupta, who teaches at Women's College in Shillong, and Trinankur Dey at ICFAI University in Tripura. They pulled eleven years of customs data and published the result in Economic and Political Weekly. Their numbers stop at 2020-21, but what they found has not aged.

The first thing is the price. Over those eleven years the region accounted for about one percent of the fruit India exported by weight — and barely a quarter of one percent of what that fruit earned. Put the two together and a tonne of fruit leaving the North East fetched roughly a quarter of what a tonne of Indian fruit earned on average. That is what unbranded, ungraded produce crossing a land border in bulk is worth. It is the difference between selling oranges and selling Khasi Mandarin.

The second thing is that the trade lurches. In 2018-19 the region sent out 10,443 tonnes of fruit. Two years later it sent 2,428. Vegetables were wilder still, and for the first four years of the study exactly one vegetable left the region at all — tomato. Nothing else.

Those two findings are really one finding. No buyer signs a season-long contract with a supplier whose volume can fall by three quarters, so the trade stays on one-off deals negotiated in the moment. One-off deals are exactly where a seller has no leverage on price. And a seller with no price has no reason to invest in the grading and packing that would end the volatility. The loop closes on itself.

The last time anyone counted properly, in September 2020, the whole of the North East had 69 cold storage units between eight states, holding 256,401 tonnes. Thirty-nine of those units, and about seven-tenths of that capacity, were in Assam. Tripura had fourteen. Meghalaya had four. Sikkim, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh had two apiece. For comparison, India as a whole passed 8,800 cold stores by the middle of last year.

It would be neat to stop there and call it a cold-storage problem, but that is not quite right — and IndianAgri has argued before that India's produce losses are a planning failure more than a refrigeration one. A cold room in the wrong place just stores the problem.

What actually moves a perishable across a border is a sequence, and every link has to hold. The fruit is picked and sorted to a written specification, so a buyer in Dubai knows what size he is getting. It is pre-cooled within hours, because a mandarin that sits warm overnight has already lost a week of its shelf life. It is packed to survive being handled four times. Then it moves refrigerated, on a schedule, to a port or an airport with room on the aircraft. Break one link and everything spent on the others is wasted.

The region is also landlocked, which the Exim Bank study names as the underlying difficulty: exporters depend on land customs stations and on ports that belong to other states. It is the same wall the region's orchid growers run into — a resource nobody disputes, sitting behind a chain nobody has built.

The standard prescription for the North East is awareness and capacity building, and it is worth saying clearly that this part is already being done.

Last year APEDA ran 115 training programmes across the eight states, reaching nearly 4,800 people. That is one programme in eight of everything it ran in the entire country, for a region growing about a thirtieth of India's fruit and vegetables. It held four buyer-seller meets, including one across the border in Gelephu in Bhutan. Whatever is missing here, it is not training.

What is missing is duller and more expensive. A packhouse at Guwahati or Agartala that can grade and pre-cool a day's harvest. Refrigerated trucks that turn up. Freight capacity to the Gulf that an exporter can book in advance. And the thing all of that exists to serve: one buyer willing to sign for volume across a season, which is the only event that makes the rest worth financing.

The region has 679 registered agricultural exporters against 42,740 in the country. Sikkim has three. Exim Bank wants exports from the North East to reach somewhere between USD 929 million and USD 1.5 billion by 2029-30. That will not be reached by growing more, because the region is already growing more than it can sell. Its share of India's fruit harvest has actually slipped over the last five years — not because output fell, but because it grew at half the national rate.

The potential was never the part in doubt. Somebody has to build the road out.