Bad News for Consumers! Prices of These Main Vegetables May Not Go Down

With the beginning of the year, consumers have shed a thousand tears over ever-increasing prices of vegetables.  Prices of the most common vegetables without which the Indian palate is complete are reaching the skies and are joining the 'Rs 100/kg club'. These common vegetables are onion, potato, and tomato.  

As per the data, the output of these vegetables was way lower during 2018-19 than the previous high in the FY 2017-18. Seeing this, it is threatening to expect what the consumers should expect from the farmers of these vegetables in the year 2020-21. That's because if the production continues to be lower than the previous year, then it is likely that the pockets of the consumers will be under a heavy burden. Around 44% of a household budget for vegetables is spent on these three vegetables - onion, potato, and tomato. And with soaring high prices of these key vegetables, this percent will increase and the overall budget of consumers will suffer largely.  

What Will Lead to the High Prices 

As per the Ministry of Agriculture, the 2019-20 crop year is expected to witness marginal rise in the output of these vegetables as compared to the last year. The production of onion is expected to increase up to 7% while potato and tomato production is likely to increase by 3.49% and 1.68% respectively. 

However, the estimates are not likely to match up with reality. It has been observed that the summer output of the onion crops had reduced by 25%. The low production in 2018-19 has made the condition even worse while the winter crop of onion in the year 2019-20 is yet to be harvested. All this together has kept the prices of onion quite higher. So, we should expect a bumper winter output to get out of the inflation spiral.  

Another reason why these prices are not likely to come down is that there has been observed a  considerable gap between the initially projected production figures for these vegetables and their final output. This gap has further impacted the market supplies, which has ultimately given arisen to the consistently rising prices of these vegetables.  

The output of these vegetables are projected to be higher in the year 2019-20, the prices will remain fluctuating for a few months because of the post-harvest losses and lack of adequate food processing infrastructure, says Anand Kumar Sood from Comtrade.