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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.

Unrest within Mahayuti

Writer: Abhijit Mulye
Abhijit Mulye
Jan 20, 2025
2 min read

Updated: Jan 21, 2025

Mahayuti

Mumbai: The state administration on Sunday stalled the appointments of guardian ministers in Raigad and Nashik districts. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had cleared the appointments before he left for Davos in Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum on Saturday. They are believed to have been stalled on behest of Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, who heads the state in absence of the Chief Minister.


NCP’s Aditi Tatkare and BJP’s Girish Mahajan were entrusted with responsibilities of guardian minister for the Raigad and Nashik districts respectively, where Shiv Sena’s Bharat Gogawale and Dada Bhuse had staked claims. Gogawale is a first-time minister while, Bhuse had been the guardian minister of the district during previous government under Eknath Shinde.


Shiv Sena, NCP and BJP all the three constituents of Mahayuti have strong roots in both the districts. However, the Shiv Sena and the NCP had been particularly on loggerheads there. The Shiv Sena, which had been demanding the guardian minister’s post in Nashik district has managed to win only two assembly seats in the district where the NCP has Six and the BJP has Five MLAs. On the contrary, in Raigad the NCP has won only one seat while the Shiv Sena and the BJP both have Three MLAs each in the district.


Sunil Tatkare, MP from Raigad Lok Sabha constituency and the stat unit president of the NCP and father of Aditi Tatkare, had been the guardian minister of Raigad between 2004 and 2014. Gogawale had always been his political opponent before Tatkare joined the Mahayuti government under Ajit Pawar’s leadership in 2023. Gogawale claimed that all the Six Shiv Sena-BJP MLAs in the district had opined in his favour to be the guardian minister of the district and after the decision to appoint Aditi Tatkare was announced, his supporters resorted to violent protests. They burnt tyres in bid to stall traffic on highway in the district. Reacting to the developments, Tatkare said that the issue should be pondered over after CM Fadnavis returns from Davos on Saturday and settled amicably.


In Nashik Girish Mahajan had been the guardian minister of the district between 2014 and 2019 when Fadnavis was the Chief Minister.


The post of guardian minister doesn’t have any constitutional mandate and is considered to be a political appointment. Guardian ministers head the district planning and development councils (DPDC) that control the funds for development works being carried out in the particular district. This control wields much of political power to the minister in that district whereby spreading the party in the district becomes much easier. This is the reason why the grass root politicians seem to be very sensitive to such appointments.


While Gogawale and Bhuse are unhappy about not being appointed as guardian ministers, some others like NCP’s Hasan Mushrif and BJP’s Pankaja Munde are unhappy about not being appointed as guardian district in their home districts of Kolhapur and Beed respectively. DCM Shinde is learnt to have gone to his ancestral village Dare in Satara district after the decision and BJP’s firefighters Chandrashekhar Bawankule and Girish Mahajan are expected to meet him there to try finding a way out of the issue.

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