Abhishek Govilkar, Head of Agribusiness at BigMint, laid out the scale of the disruption in a conversation with ET Now, and the picture is more severe than headline numbers suggest.
The numbers tell the story
Vessel movement through the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed from a normal daily flow of 130 to 150 ships down to fewer than 10 to 11 ships per day. That is a reduction of more than 90% in shipping traffic through one of the world’s most critical trade chokepoints.
Freight charges for rice shipments from Indian west coast ports to Middle Eastern destinations have jumped 20% to 22% in just 30 to 35 days. For exporters already managing tight margins on agricultural commodities, that cost spike is being absorbed directly into their bottom lines with no easy way to pass it on.
Why the Middle East cannot simply be replaced
Iran alone accounts for 12% to 13% of India’s total basmati rice exports. When you add the broader Middle East region, the dependency becomes even more pronounced. Govilkar is blunt about the difficulty of finding alternative buyers at short notice.
Indian exporters and traders are actively searching for substitute markets, but no single geography can absorb that volume quickly. Europe and the United States have shown meaningful growth as basmati destinations over the past six to seven months, and export volumes to both regions have improved considerably over the past year. But Govilkar stresses that these gains, while encouraging for the long term, fall well short of compensating for what the Middle East consumes in a normal year.
Even a ceasefire will not fix this quickly
A 15-day ceasefire between the US, Israel and Iran has been announced, but Govilkar cautions that a ceasefire alone does not reopen the trade lanes overnight. The voyage time from Indian west coast ports to Hormuz-region destinations is 12 to 13 days under normal conditions. Shipping lines remain uncomfortable resuming full services on a 15-day window, and the backlog of stranded cargo means that even when traffic resumes, it will take considerably longer to clear the pipeline.The practical reality is that exporters are sitting on contracted cargo with no clear delivery timeline, paying elevated freight rates on shipments that are going nowhere, and watching their working capital get tied up in transit.
A structural warning for Indian agri exports
What this crisis has exposed is a concentration risk that the Indian rice export industry has quietly accumulated over years of strong Middle East demand. When a single chokepoint can strand four lakh tonnes of cargo and cut a trade corridor’s vessel traffic by over 90% in a matter of weeks, the vulnerability of relying on one dominant regional buyer becomes impossible to ignore.
The longer-term push into Europe and the US is the right strategic response, but those markets take time to develop, require different certifications, packaging standards and buyer relationships, and cannot be scaled up in weeks to cover an emergency.
For now, Indian basmati exporters are in a waiting game, watching ceasefire negotiations, monitoring when shipping lines feel confident enough to resume normal services, and hoping the backlog can be cleared before contract penalties and storage costs begin compounding the damage already done.