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By:

Parashram Patil

14 January 2026 at 8:49:45 pm

Crops of Conflict

As water and climate become instruments of geopolitical leverage, India has an opportunity to turn agricultural resilience into a new form of South-South diplomacy. Climate change is making an old truth harder to ignore: food security is national security. As water becomes scarcer, harvests more erratic and trade policies more protectionist, agriculture is moving from the margins of geopolitics to its centre. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where fragile food systems intersect with...

Crops of Conflict

As water and climate become instruments of geopolitical leverage, India has an opportunity to turn agricultural resilience into a new form of South-South diplomacy. Climate change is making an old truth harder to ignore: food security is national security. As water becomes scarcer, harvests more erratic and trade policies more protectionist, agriculture is moving from the margins of geopolitics to its centre. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where fragile food systems intersect with contested rivers, conflict and disrupted supply chains. For India, this presents not merely a humanitarian challenge but an opportunity to practise a more strategic form of food diplomacy. Clear Warning The Nile basin offers the clearest warning. Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia depend heavily on the river, directly or indirectly, for agriculture and livelihoods. Egypt obtains roughly 90-95 percent of its water from the Nile, with most of its withdrawals going to agriculture. Wheat, rice, maize and cotton are therefore inseparable from the country's water security. Sudan is similarly dependent on the Main Nile and its Blue and White Nile tributaries for crops including sorghum, wheat, cotton and sugarcane. Ethiopia, by contrast, relies much more heavily on rain-fed agriculture, but the Blue Nile remains crucial to its plans for agricultural and economic expansion. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has transformed this already delicate equation. The Blue Nile supplies roughly 85 percent of the Nile's runoff, giving Ethiopia substantial geographical leverage upstream. Egypt and Sudan, downstream and more dependent on the river, have consequently viewed the dam through the prism of food and water security. The dispute has its roots partly in the 1959 agreement that allocated Nile waters between Egypt and Sudan, but the rise of Ethiopia as a major upstream power has altered the political balance. The stakes are enormous. A disruption to water availability is not simply an environmental problem when millions depend on irrigated agriculture. It can affect food prices, livelihoods, migration and political stability. Across the basin, the consequences potentially extend to hundreds of millions of people. The lesson is straightforward: rivers can become geopolitical infrastructure, and crops can become strategic assets. Critical Role This is where India can play a useful role. Its longstanding diplomatic, commercial and maritime links with Africa give it an established platform. Its experience in producing wheat, rice and millets, meanwhile, gives it something more tangible: the ability to contribute to food-supply resilience. Egypt, for instance, remains heavily dependent on imports and is projected to require around 13 million tonnes of wheat imports to bridge its consumption gap. Sudan’s agricultural crisis is still more acute. Conflict and climate stress have sharply reduced cereal production, leaving output well below recent historical averages. India could therefore build food diplomacy around two complementary tracks. The first is supply. Predictable grain arrangements and strategic food buffers could help vulnerable countries absorb shocks in international markets. The second is technology. India's experience with micro-irrigation, precision farming and water-use efficiency offers tools that may help African farmers produce more with less water. The Per Drop More Crop component of the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana is one example. Drip irrigation, improved canal management, seepage reduction and precision agriculture cannot resolve a dispute over the Nile, but they can reduce the amount of water required to produce a given crop. For this to become a durable strategy, however, India will need to move beyond individual projects. Bilateral agricultural agreements with African countries could be converted into longer-term trade corridors and grain-supply arrangements. Multilateral platforms, including BRICS, could provide mechanisms for greater transparency in food distribution and market stabilisation. Seed exchanges could focus on drought-tolerant millets, biofortified wheat and heat-resistant maize suited to increasingly volatile climates. Indian private enterprise could be brought into this architecture. Agritech startups and Farmer-Producer Organisations could be encouraged to enter African markets through export-linked grants, incubation programmes and risk-sharing mechanisms. EXIM Bank credit lines and export guarantees could reduce the financial risks of deploying solar cold chains, irrigation systems and agricultural technologies in politically volatile markets. Public-private partnerships could also help Indian firms adapt AI-based crop advisory systems and IoT-enabled water sensors to African soils and farming practices. The larger opportunity is strategic. India’s relationship with Africa need not be confined to trade, infrastructure or diplomatic declarations. Agriculture offers a practical form of South-South cooperation in which food, technology and water efficiency reinforce one another. (The writer is a member of Maharashtra Agriculture Price Commission. Views personal.

MNS helped UBT win half of its total tally

Writer: Abhijit Mulye
Abhijit Mulye
Nov 28, 2024
2 min read

Updated: Nov 29, 2024

MNS

Mumbai: Though Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS) had not supported the Mahayuti in assembly election, unlike they did in the Lok Sabha, Raj Thackeray had asserted that the party shall be part of the government if Mahayuti returns to power in the state. However, while the party couldn’t get any of its candidate elected, it seems that their presence has actually helped the Shiv Sena (UBT) win at least half of their seats. This has further reduced the chances of MNS getting any share of power in the state government now.


A closer look at the votes polled by the MNS shows that it has helped the Shiv Sena (UBT) candidates at least on 10 seats where the MNS candidates remained in the third position and Mahayuti candidates lost the seat by margins lower than the votes polled by the MNS candidates. Vikroli, Kogeshwari East, Dindoshi, Kalina, Vandre East, Mahim and Worli are the seven out of these 10 constituencies where the UBT clearly seems to have gained sufficient margin to win the seats because of the MNS candidates.


One can look at the most spectacular triangular contest in Mumbai that took place in the Worli constituency. Shiv Sena (UBT) scion Aditya Thackeray who fetched 63,324 votes defeated Milind Deora of Shiv Sena by 8801 votes. Deora got 54,523 votes while the third candidate Sandeep Deshpande of the MNS fetched 19,367 votes.


Deora said that all efforts were made to turn the MNS to its favour. “We were in touch with them. We even met some of their demands. But, after a limit they started becoming impracticable and it wasn’t possible to meet all their demands. We knew that it was not their purpose, yet, they became the ‘B’ team of Shiv Sena (UBT),” he added.


In Dindoshi Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Nirupam lost by 6182 votes to Shiv Sena (UBT)’s Sunil Prabhu, where the MNS candidate fetched 20,309 votes. Data like this further strengthens the ‘B’-team rhetoric. While reacting to the results Nirupam Said, “In 2009 people felt that the MNS was eating up the Shiv Sena votes which benefitted the Congress. However, at least on seven seats in Mumbai, the MNS grabbed Marathi votes and in turn helped the Shiv Sena (UBT). We realized this during the campaign. But, by then it was too late to rectify that.”


Raj Thackeray’s son Amit stood third in the bastion of undivided Shiv Sena – Mahim. This is the home constituency of Raj Thackeray. In the triangular contest between MNS’ Amit, Shiv Sena’s Sada Sarvankar and UBT’s Mahesh Sawant in this constituency Sawant won by 1316 votes while Amit could fetch only 17,151 votes.


Interestingly, the MNS had not fielded any candidate in any of the 16 constituencies where Congress won or the 10 constituencies where NCP-SP won. This clearly indicates that though MNS had vouched support to the Mahayuti, they were actually helping the MVA. However, the voters in the state rejected them. The MNS could gather only about 1.8 percent votes in the state even though they had contested 125 seats. This is likely to affect the party’s status and may also lead them in losing their party symbol.

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