Why ‘local’ mangoes are losing out to ‘exotic’ apples

In that spirit of enquiry, one may compare apples and mangoes, more so as they appear to be headed in different directions. Apples are vying for eternal glory, while mangoes are in tatters.

Sample these numbers: In 2024-25, India’s mango exports, including fresh fruit and pulp, were valued at just ₹1,150 crore. In comparison, Indians ate imported apples worth ₹3,800 crore, which also hurt earnings of domestic apple growers from Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. The total fresh fruit import bill came to ₹25,770 crore.

Now, when a nation calls a fruit its own—like India’s bond with mangoes—but treats it with neglect, a comparison is par for the course. When apples are conquering the world, should mangoes be pushed into oblivion?

What’s pushing the downfall of mangoes?

First things first. India is a centre of origin for mango, and scientific evidence suggests that Mangifera indica originated in the Indo-Burma region, spanning Myanmar, Bangladesh, and northeastern India. This hypothesis is based on 60-million-year-old fossil impressions of carbonized mango leaves.

Apples, on the other hand, originated in the mountains of Central Asia, in modern-day Kazakhstan, and spread to Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

In short, mangoes are native to India, and apples are an exotic fruit.

Indians are crazy about mangoes, and India produces more than 22 million tonnes of them every year, second only to bananas.

But for several years on end, the hallowed mangoes of India have been struggling. Firstly, most varieties from Alphonso to Dasheri are between 200-500 years old and are not coping well with growing climate adversities. Factors like heatwaves, extended monsoon, temperature swings and sudden storms are taking a toll on the fruit and its growers.

Farmers now pre-sell their harvest and outsource management of orchards to contractors. These fly-by-night operators use extractive practices and excessive chemicals, leading to a decline in quality, besides rendering the fruit unfit for exports.

Decades from now, if India loses its mango diversity and a few of its prized cultivars, who can it blame but itself?

And how are apples thriving?

The shaky future of the mango is in sharp contrast to apples, with global breeding initiatives aiming for heat-tolerant varieties. The University of Maryland has developed new apples that are genetically designed to tolerate warmer growing conditions. Being a temperate fruit, apple cultivation is susceptible to rising temperatures.

Another notable initiative is the Hot Climate Partnership—a collaboration between New Zealand and Spain—to develop apples that can grow in warmer regions. In 2023, the alliance announced its first breakthrough: an apple variety named Tutti that can withstand day temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius. That’s like growing apples in Agra.

Post-harvest technologies for apples have also seen tremendous improvement. Apples are now pre-cooled and stored in controlled atmosphere facilities for 4-10 months without any loss of taste, crunch, and nutrition, allowing them to be transported over very long distances.

Can’t mangoes be transported over long distances?

Apples are a temperate fruit, so they are more amenable to cold-chain technologies. In comparison, mangoes are a tropical fruit harvested during peak summer. Yet it is hard to accept that India, the largest producer, has yet to develop a post-harvest technology that can extend the shelf life of mangoes by a week or so. That can create a wider market, both within and outside the country.

Most domestic mango varieties are now limited to their respective geographies: for instance, the Zardalu of Bihar or Himsagar of West Bengal cannot be found in markets outside of their home state.

Fruit exporters say the short shelf life of India’s ancient mango cultivars, hovering between 5-12 days, is one reason why the fruit cannot be shipped using longer and cheaper sea routes. Extending the shelf life by two weeks can be a gamechanger. Some technologies are currently in trial, including one—a bio-stimulant named Metwash—developed by the Central Institute of Subtropical Horticulture, Lucknow.

The other needed intervention is to develop lab-bred varieties that are climate resilient, have a higher shelf life, or both. Unfortunately, funding for breeding and research is minuscule. The last lab-grown mangoes that achieved some commercial success and popularity among consumers—Mallika and Amrapali—were developed decades ago, in the 1970s.

And why is that?

For scientists, mango is not an easy fruit to work with because they are highly heterozygous, which means trees show a lot of variability at the time of fruiting (so do apples). In simple words, a mango tree born out of a seed is unlikely to bear fruits with the same characteristics as the parent tree.

Growers get around this problem by grafting the best varieties on top of seedlings. Which means, a single tree could have been the mother plant, say of the Alphonso variety, from which tens of thousands of trees were crafted by the human hand. For a breeder, it’s a long game of trial and error.

Scientists say developing a new mango variety can take at least two decades. A promising lab release may take another decade to reach the farmer’s field and the consumer’s plate. That is a good enough reason to pump money into climate-proofing mango—before it is too late.

But until India finds a breakthrough mango variety, apples will continue to steal the show because of their round-the-year availability, better fruit quality, and aggressive marketing by global sellers.

“Nature’s success stories are probably going to look a lot more like the apple’s than the (vulnerable) panda’s or the white leopard’s,” wrote Michael Pollan in his 2001 treatise, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. If those last two species have a future, it will be because of the human desire to conserve them, Pollan added.

Mango is in dire need of some of that ‘human desire’—or should one say, a very Indian desire?