Commodities, Featured Work, India, Pakistan, Travel - Saturday, July 10, 2010 18:46 - 0 Comments

Asian Geographic: Cream of the Crop

Asian Geographic, July 2010

“Basmati,” says Rajat Beg, “is the champagne of rice.”

As an executive of India’s REI Agro, one of the world’s major basmati producers, you might say he’s biased. But he has a point. Basmati – the word means “the fragrant one” in Sanskrit – isn’t just a source of sustenance: its rarity, and the sheer difficulty of producing it, has made it a status symbol in its own right. In class-conscious India and elsewhere, if you serve basmati rice, you’re making a statement.

Basmati’s prestige stems from the painstaking process involved in growing it. Everything from the temperature to the soil, the humidity, the timing and the storage of the rice is vital. It grows in only two countries in the world, Pakistan and India; and within India, which accounts for three quarters of the global harvest, it only grows in four provinces and constitutes barely 2% of the Indian national rice crop.

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