How a natural compound called hexanal is helping prevent India’s lucrative fruit crops from spoiling.
India is the world’s second-largest producer of tropical fruit and vegetables, but a huge amount of the harvest — up to 40 per cent — is lost to spoilage on the farm, in the warehouse and in transit before it ever reaches the consumer.
Mangoes, for example, can be a lucrative crop, but the entire harvest tends to ripen within a very short time. This causes a sudden glut on the market, driving down prices and leaving excess fruit to rot. “The fruit is ready on the tree, but there is no way to get it to market,” says Jayasankar Subramanian, an agricultural biotechnologist at the University of Guelph. Read more in Canadian Geographic.