Baseline Study for Sugar Supply Chain in Districts of Maharashtra

India is the world's biggest consumer and second largest producer of sugar, after Brazil (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2022). It produces around 15-17% of the world sugar production every year and an estimated quantity of 380 million tons of sugarcane is cultivated in a land of about 5.5 million hectares (ISMA, 2023) . Sugarcane is one of the significant cash crops in India accounting for approximately 7.5 % of the gross value of national agricultural production, and providing livelihood for 50 million farmers and their families (Fair Labor Association, 2012) Maharashtra is the second biggest sugar producing state in India after Uttar Pradesh and has almost 28.5% of the total number of sugar factories in the country (Directorate of Economics and Statistics, 2019). The state is also very vulnerable to climate change effects, as extreme climatic events like irregular rainfall, heat waves and prolonged dry spells are increasingly common. Such climate change events have had a significant impact on the rural community. About 1.5 million people move annually with their children to the western districts of Maharashtra and work as sugarcane cutters. Of that, almost 0.5 million migrate from Beed district alone and that makes it the biggest source of migrant farm labourers in the sugar industry (Asawa & Singh, 2016). Beed is an area of the State of Maharashtra in India that has suffered from drought for four years, from 2013 to 2016, and currently has water scarcity as well as agrarian distress (Jadhav, 2019). The irony in this is that despite the acute shortage of water, the cultivation of sugarcane in Maharashtra is still on the rise as it promises a guaranteed income and price support.