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Salman does not introduce himself when he answers the phone. He doesn’t ask my name or what I want. “How many boxes?” he asks immediately. His voice is sharp, urgent, frantic. Between each question I ask him, he returns to the same refrain: “How many boxes?” The desperation is audible. I begin to feel guilty for holding him up – each minute on the phone is a moment he could be trying to move a box, find a buyer, or salvage something from his catastrophe.

He is speaking from Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, surrounded by 60,000 boxes of Alphonso mangoes. Each box contains 12 perfectly ripened fruits worth Rs 3,500 if they reach their West Asian destinations. As of March 2026, no container has moved. Transit through the Strait of Hormuz has become highly restricted and commercially unviable. The buyers in Dubai, Qatar, and the UAE, who have been buying Ratnagiri mangoes for generations, have stopped placing orders.

Salman faces a catastrophic calculation: Rs 3,500 per box in the export market or Rs 1,500 per box in the domestic Indian market. At the lower rate, he will lose Rs 12 crore. When I finally tell him I’m a journalist writing about the crisis, he cuts through the formality: “Please share in your groups. Share with your friends. Tell anyone who will listen. I have mangoes. I need buyers.” And then, urgently: “How many boxes can you find buyers for?”

The mangoes cannot wait. They will rot in weeks.

The same crisis, different impact

On the same day that Salman called, desperate and frantic, tea exporter Sandeep Khaitan in Kolkata was facing an eerily similar crisis. Not with mangoes, but with tea. Not in Ratnagiri, but in warehouses across India’s tea belt. Not with 60,000 boxes, but with millions of kilograms of Orthodox tea meant for the same buyers Salman was trying to reach: Iran, Iraq, the UAE.

The cause, however, was identical: the escalation around the Strait of Hormuz on March 5, 2026. Within 48 hours, several major marine insurers issued notices restricting cover. War-risk insurance was sharply restricted or priced prohibitively. The cost of moving any cargo........

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