Growing in India: Food for the world

JALLOWAL, India Within days, the monsoon will arrive in India. If generous,it will lend another year of survival to hundreds of millions of villagers.If miserly, crops will wither and bankruptcy will run virally through thevillages.

One-tenth of humanity resides in rural India, in villages haunted by theperennial specter of harvesting too little food. But now a country that longstruggled to feed itself is making preparations to feed the world.

Multinational companies from Wal-Mart to Rothschild Group to PepsiCo arewagering that India could parlay its tropical climate and the latentenergies of hundreds of millions of farm dwellers into a position as anagribusiness powerhouse, exporting fruits and vegetables, spices, flowers,wine, ice cream, poultry, shrimp, fish and even pasta.

'To my mind, this opportunity of agriculture is an opportunity which islarger than telecom, which is larger than IT,' said Rakesh Mittal, vicechairman of Bharti Enterprises, a $16 billion Indian holding company that isheavily invested in both telecommunications and information technology.

Bharti runs a mobile phone company with 22 million subscribers and hasnew-economy interests ranging from call centers to offshore softwaredevelopment. But in a strategic shift, the company recently announced thatit was investing with Rothschild Group, a European private equity group, ina venture called Field Fresh, which will export onions, chilies, okra andother vegetables to Western retailers, including Tesco of Britain.

The venture has already leased 1,860 hectares, or 4,600 acres, of land andsent its first shipments to Europe. It expects to be a leader in an Indianfood export market for fruits and vegetables that the company expects willreach $5 billion by 2011.

'India has become the back office of the world,' Mittal said during a recentinterview at his headquarters in Delhi. Referring to business-processoutsourcing, he added: 'What we are trying to create here is BPO in theagricultural sector. We will grow for the world.'

The vision is to link India's small farmers to global supply chains inagriculture, just as its software writers and call-center workers have beenlinked to other segments of the global economy. Farmers would move fromstaples like wheat to higher-value crops like okra and onions, Alphonsomangoes, spices, shrimp, Darjeeling tea, long-grain basmati rice, cashewnuts, milk and buffalo meat.

Big companies, foreign and domestic, would aggregate the crops harvestedfrom scores of small farms, process them into value-added products likesausages or fruit pur