A2 · Elementary
11 min
food securityclimate and weatheragricultureindia
The Storm and the Wheat: India, Climate, and Food
La Tormenta y el Trigo: India, el Clima y la Comida
A powerful storm kills more than a hundred people across Uttar Pradesh, India. Fletcher and Octavio dig into wheat, farmers, and what extreme weather means for the future of food.
Una tormenta muy fuerte mata a más de cien personas en Uttar Pradesh, India. Fletcher y Octavio hablan del trigo, los agricultores y el futuro de la comida en un mundo con tormentas más peligrosas.
8 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| tormenta | storm | La tormenta destruye los campos de trigo. |
| trigo | wheat | India produce mucho trigo cada año. |
| agricultor | farmer | El agricultor trabaja mucho en el campo. |
| fuerte | strong / loud / intense (depending on context) | Hay una tormenta muy fuerte en el norte. |
| peligroso | dangerous | Las tormentas son muy peligrosas para los agricultores. |
| precio | price | El precio del pan sube después de la tormenta. |
| cosecha | harvest | En mayo, la cosecha de trigo está lista. |
| reservas | reserves / stocks | El gobierno tiene reservas de comida para emergencias. |
A storm tore through twelve districts of Uttar Pradesh yesterday.
Over a hundred people dead, fifty-nine injured.
And my first thought, honestly, was not the death toll.
My first thought was: it's May.
That's wheat country.
That's harvest time.
Sí.
Yes.
Uttar Pradesh es muy importante.
Uttar Pradesh is very important.
Es el estado más grande de India.
It is India's largest state.
Largest by population.
Two hundred and thirty million people.
That's more than Brazil.
Y produce mucho trigo.
And it produces a lot of wheat.
Mucho arroz también.
A lot of rice too.
It's the single largest wheat-producing state in India.
And in May, the crop is either being cut or it's already sitting in the fields waiting to be cut.
A storm like this, with heavy rain and wind, can flatten a field in twenty minutes.
Para el agricultor, es un desastre.
For the farmer, it is a disaster.
El trigo está en el suelo.
The wheat is on the ground.
And once it's on the ground, especially with rain, it rots.
You can't recover it.
The work of an entire growing season, gone.
El agricultor en India no tiene mucho dinero.
The farmer in India does not have much money.
Un mal año es muy difícil.
A bad year is very difficult.
That's the part that doesn't make the headlines.
A hundred and four people dead is obviously the immediate tragedy.
But the economic shock that follows a storm like this, to farmers who are already operating on essentially no margin, that ripples out for months.
En India, muchos agricultores tienen deudas.
In India, many farmers have debts.
La tormenta hace todo peor.
The storm makes everything worse.
I covered the farmer crisis in India back in the early 2000s.
The suicide rates among indebted farmers were catastrophic.
And the structural problem, too much debt, too little insurance, too dependent on one crop, has never really been solved.
Es verdad.
That is true.
El problema es muy antiguo.
The problem is very old.
No es nuevo.
It is not new.
Ancient, almost.
And yet every time I hear about a storm in Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra or Punjab, I think about that, about how thin the margin actually is between a harvest and a catastrophe.
¿Y el precio del trigo?
And the price of wheat?
¿Sube después de la tormenta?
Does it go up after the storm?
Good question.
Locally, yes, almost certainly.
At the national level it depends on how widespread the damage is across those twelve districts.
But India is one of the world's largest wheat producers and exporters, so when UP has a bad season, it doesn't just stay in UP.
India exporta trigo a muchos países pobres.
India exports wheat to many poor countries.
Es muy importante.
It is very important.
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia.
Parts of Africa.
When India restricted wheat exports in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine and global supplies tightened, prices jumped across South Asia within weeks.
That was a policy decision.
A storm is harder to predict and harder to respond to.
Las tormentas en mayo son normales en India.
Storms in May are normal in India.
Pero ahora son más fuertes.
But now they are stronger.
That's exactly the shift that's been documented.
Pre-monsoon storms, the ones that roll through northern India between March and June, have always been part of the agricultural calendar.
Farmers plan around them.
But the intensity is increasing, and that changes the calculation completely.
El agricultor no puede cambiar su plan muy rápido.
The farmer cannot change his plan very quickly.
Es difícil adaptarse.
It is hard to adapt.
And the crop calendar is basically fixed.
You plant wheat in November, you harvest in April or May.
You can't just move the harvest if a storm is coming, the way you might reschedule something else.
Nature doesn't negotiate.
En España también tenemos problemas con el clima.
In Spain we also have problems with the climate.
El olivo, la naranja, el vino...
The olive tree, the orange, the wine...
todo cambia.
everything is changing.
I was about to ask you about that.
Because Spain has had some brutal harvests the last few years.
The olive oil shortage was genuinely felt in kitchens across Europe.
Sí.
Yes.
El precio del aceite de oliva sube mucho.
The price of olive oil goes up a lot.
Es un problema para las familias.
It is a problem for families.
And the thing is, Spain and India are not comparable economies in most respects.
But that price signal, the way a drought or a storm in one place becomes an expense in someone else's kitchen thousands of miles away, that's universal now.
La comida conecta todo.
Food connects everything.
Es política, es historia, es clima.
It is politics, it is history, it is climate.
That's actually a good way to put it.
When I was in Beirut in the late nineties, one of the things that struck me was how every political crisis eventually expressed itself through food.
Price of bread goes up, that's the thing ordinary people feel before they feel anything else.
El pan es muy importante en la historia.
Bread is very important in history.
En Francia, en Rusia, en Egipto también.
In France, in Russia, in Egypt too.
The Arab Spring.
Egypt in 2011.
The price of bread was a genuine trigger.
And where did Egypt's wheat come from?
Ukraine and Russia.
The same corridor that's now disrupted by a different war.
These chains are longer and more fragile than most people realize.
Muchos países dependen de pocos países para la comida.
Many countries depend on few countries for food.
Es un problema grande.
It is a big problem.
Concentration risk is the term economists use.
You have a handful of countries producing most of the world's wheat, rice, and corn.
Ukraine, Russia, India, the United States, Argentina, Australia.
If two or three of those have a bad year simultaneously, which climate change makes increasingly likely, the system has very little slack.
India tiene mucha gente.
India has many people.
Necesita mucha comida para sus propios ciudadanos.
It needs a lot of food for its own citizens.
Right, and that tension, between feeding your own people and being a reliable exporter, is exactly what India wrestled with in 2022.
When global prices spiked and there was money to be made, the political pressure to export was enormous.
But so was the domestic pressure to keep prices low.
En España, el gobierno también controla algunos precios de comida.
In Spain, the government also controls some food prices.
No es fácil.
It is not easy.
Nobody's found a clean answer to that one.
And with a storm like this one, the policy questions come fast.
Do you compensate the farmers?
Do you release grain reserves?
Do you restrict exports temporarily?
Every choice has a cost somewhere.
¿India tiene reservas de trigo?
Does India have wheat reserves?
¿Tiene mucho en almacén?
Does it have a lot in storage?
It does, actually.
India's Food Corporation of India holds substantial buffer stocks precisely for situations like this.
But the distribution system, getting grain from warehouses to the people who need it, especially in rural districts hit by a storm, that's where things historically break down.
Los caminos están rotos después de la tormenta.
The roads are broken after the storm.
No puedes llevar comida fácilmente.
You cannot bring food easily.
Infrastructure is the unglamorous bottleneck in every food crisis.
You can have grain sitting in a warehouse two hundred kilometers away, and if the road is flooded or the bridge is out, it might as well be on the moon.
I've watched that happen in three different countries.
En España, después de las inundaciones de Valencia, también hay muchos problemas con los caminos.
In Spain, after the Valencia floods, there are also many problems with the roads.
The Valencia floods.
November 2024.
That's still fresh.
And you're right, the immediate humanitarian issue gets attention, but the agricultural recovery, the orchards, the rice fields in the Albufera, that's a years-long process that mostly happens off camera.
La gente habla del desastre.
People talk about the disaster.
Pero después, nadie habla del agricultor.
But afterwards, nobody talks about the farmer.
Es injusto.
It is unfair.
That's the thing that bothers me most about how these stories get covered.
The storm is news.
The death toll is news.
The images of damaged houses are news.
The farmer who rebuilt for two years and then had to sell the land anyway, that story never gets told.
Los jóvenes en los pueblos de India no quieren ser agricultores ahora.
Young people in the villages of India do not want to be farmers now.
Van a las ciudades.
They go to the cities.
That migration is reshaping everything.
Uttar Pradesh's cities, Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi, are absorbing millions of people who used to farm.
And as that happens, who actually grows the food?
Older farmers, on shrinking plots, with less labor available and more extreme weather coming.
En España también.
In Spain too.
Los pueblos pequeños están vacíos.
The small villages are empty.
Es un problema europeo.
It is a European problem.
It's a global problem, really.
The people who know how to grow food are getting older and fewer, and the people who've replaced them in the workforce don't have that knowledge.
And then a storm comes and you realize just how much depends on people who are not appreciated until they're gone.
Oye, Fletcher.
Hey, Fletcher.
Antes dices 'más fuertes'.
Before you say 'stronger'.
Yo digo 'más peligrosas'.
I say 'more dangerous'.
¿Cuál es la diferencia?
What is the difference?
Ha.
I was wondering when you'd catch that.
'Stronger' is the raw physical property, the wind speed, the rainfall intensity.
'More dangerous' adds the human layer.
A storm can be strong but not dangerous if it hits empty land.
Same storm over a farming district at harvest time?
Completely different story.
I think you mean 'más peligrosas' every time, actually.
Sí, exacto.
Yes, exactly.
'Peligroso' es para personas.
'Dangerous' is for people.
'Fuerte' es para el viento o el agua.
'Strong' is for the wind or the water.
Son diferentes.
They are different.
So 'peligroso' is dangerous in the sense of harm to people or things, and 'fuerte' is more like powerful, intense.
And in Spanish, you can say 'una tormenta fuerte' for a strong storm, but 'una situación peligrosa' for a dangerous situation.
Same idea works in English, but I don't think I've ever stopped to notice it before.
En español usamos 'fuerte' para muchas cosas.
In Spanish we use 'fuerte' for many things.
Un café fuerte, un hombre fuerte, una tormenta fuerte.
A strong coffee, a strong man, a strong storm.
Un café fuerte.
That I understand completely.
My morning is built around that concept.
But I can see how 'fuerte' is doing a lot of work in Spanish the way 'strong' does in English.
Strong opinion, strong smell, strong coffee.
Same word, different register every time.
Exacto.
Exactly.
'Fuerte' no es siempre 'strong' en inglés.
'Fuerte' is not always 'strong' in English.
A veces es 'loud', a veces 'intense'.
Sometimes it is 'loud', sometimes 'intense'.
Depende del contexto.
It depends on the context.
That is genuinely useful.
And the kind of thing you only learn by paying attention to how someone actually talks, not from a dictionary.
Which is, I suppose, why we're here.
Uttar Pradesh, wheat, storms, the price of bread, and an accidental Spanish lesson.
A good hour's work, Octavio.
Sí.
Yes.
Y la próxima vez, Fletcher, dices 'una tormenta fuerte' con buena pronunciación, ¿sí?
And next time, Fletcher, you say 'una tormenta fuerte' with good pronunciation, yes?