If you go to a lot of industry conferences like I do, you’ll hear a lot of talk about India.
India’s a huge buyer of Canadian pulses, sometimes buys our other crops, and sometimes – shockingly – ends up exporting wheat when the country’s farmers grow a lot. So it’s a big freakin’ deal in the world markets.
But don’t take my word for it. And don’t assume you know it all from the dull presentations you’ve seen before that talk about India.
Go and get fresh, cool, free stuff on elements of India you’ve never heard about before at Mary MacArthur’s blog on the Western Producer site. Mary, the reporter in our Camrose bureau, is in India right now, checking out this massively important market and country. And as a journalist, she’s doing a great job of showing you the sides of India that don’t often make it into market outlook sessions.
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To see her blog, go to www.producer.com and look for the Taj Mahal. Click on it for a quick trip to curryland.
Mary’s a great feature writer and a fantastic photographer, so there’s a lot of great stuff up on the blog already. Check out her piece on riding the railway in India. Her description of her overpopulated cabin was engaging. The photo she posted of a little girl on the train moved my heart. And her mercifully sparse description of the public toilet on the train almost moved my stomach.
In these little portraits she’s painting, you get a far more nuanced vision of India than you get through markets stories and presentations at conferences, and that’s probably key to actually understanding a market like India. You have to leave a lot of your assumptions behind when you try to understand a completely different civilization like India’s. (I found the same thing when I went to Brazil a few years ago: the nation and people I found were both subtly and sometimes profoundly different than I expected from reading hundreds of markets and feature stories about the place.)
Just now my Blackberry buzzed with a message from STAT Publishing, the special crops markets and data service: India Tenders for Desi Chickpeas, says the headline. India is indeed a centrally important market for many of our commodities, and if you read Mary’s blog, you’ll know a bunch more about it. Plus you’ll get a great read, and that’s worth its time in gold.
So get wise, go to www.producer.com and read Mary’s blog.
