India wants to join the strawberry superpowers

An important development from the financial markets: India wants to join the strawberry superpowersImage source, Krishan BhilareImage caption, India relies on strawberry varieties from the US and EuropeByPriti GuptaMumbaiPublished2 hours agoIn the west of India, the mountainous region of Mahabaleshwar is home to most of India's strawberry farms. Around 85% of India's strawberry cultivation happens there. An altitude of more than 1,000m (3,280ft) gifts the region a long cool growing season between November and March.

In addition, light, well-drained soil is well-suited to strawberry cultivation. But that doesn't mean farmers have an easy life - it's a labour intensive and risky way to make a living. "If you have a field full of strawberries and sudden heavy rains hit, the entire crop is ruined and we have to bear massive losses," says Sheetal Danavle who, with her husband, grows strawberries on half of their three-acre farm.

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Strawberry plants have to be replaced every season and are not grown from seed. Instead, farmers buy young plants from suppliers. For Danavle, on her small farm, that's an outlay of $2,500 (£1,900) every year.

"If the season goes well, you can earn double your investment. But the climate makes it a huge gamble," she says. Image source, Sheetal DanavleImage caption, Farming strawberries can be a "huge gamble" says Sheetal DanavleThousands of farmers grow strawberries across the Mahabaleshwar region, making the fruit one of the most profitable horticultural crops in western India.

Despite that success the industry still relies on varieties that are imported from California, Florida, Italy and Spain, as no one in India has developed a domestic plant. It can take 10 to 15 years for breeders in the US and Europe to develop a top quality fruit and they patent their varieties. "We import the certified mother plant from the breeder abroad," says Nelson Sequeira, the founder and director of Tara Farms Fresh, a licensed strawberry propagator.

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Once imported the plants have to go through a government quarantine, before they are planted in a nursery. There the mother plant produces daughter plants and those are then sold to farmers. "One single imported mother plant becomes an engine.

That single mother plant will shoot out runners to yield an average of 20 daughter plants - with some advanced growers pushing that up to 30 or 40," says Sequeira. It's a high-tech and precision operation. "The plants do not touch the ground.

We use large industrial pipes split completely in half to form long, rounded gutter containers," Sequeira explains. "Instead of soil, we pack these containers with a specialized coco-peat substrate derived entirely from coconut husk. We then integrate a highly precise drip-irrigation and fogging system to control micro-climates.

Economists are analysing what the news means for the markets.