On sweeping fields once blanketed in lush purple, a thin and bedraggled crop of flowers is all farmers in Indian-administered Kashmir’s saffron-growing region Pampore have to show for this year’s harvest.
Dry conditions blamed on climate change have seen yields of the world’s most expensive spice halved in the past two decades, threatening the future of a cash crop that has brought wealth to the region for 2,500 years.
“These fields used to be like goldmines,” said Abdul Ahad Mir in Pampore, just south of Indian-administered Kashmir’s main city Srinagar.
Saffron has long thrived there and Mir’s family was reared in the delicate work of plucking the lucrative but tiny crimson…
Keep on reading: Climate change ravages Kashmir’s ‘red gold’ saffron crop