INDIA'S chilli market has suffered an unforgiving combination of extreme dry weather and heavy flooding this year, which has sent prices sharply higher. In mid-August this year, there was a very real fear that India's chilli crop for the 2009/10 season would be devastated as a result of the near-drought situation that prevailed in the chilli-growing areas of the Andhra Pradesh, the southern Indian state that accounts for nearly 60% of the country's total production of the red-hot spice. Just six weeks later, the prodigality of the weather has seen Andhra facing the worst flooding in the last 100 years. The chilli crop on 59,000 hectares, which had been starved of water, causing a 50% rise in its price in comparison with prices prevailing in the same month last year, has been simply deluged, with equally disastrous results... Read More