Name: Kunri, Umerkot
Pop.: 26,600
Area: 585 km²
The farmers say the origin story goes something like this. In the sixties, a handful of chilli seeds travelled south from Radha Ram in Punjab to Kunri in Sindh. Harvest after hot harvest proved so successful that within two decades the town shot to fame as the red chilli capital of Asia. The farmers put their fortune down to divine largesse but the scientific explanation is far more mundane: Kunri simply had exactly the right climate for a brief window of time—partially humid and partially dry—for its soils to produce one variety of chilli that cannot be grown anywhere else in the world.
That chilli is Dundicut or Longi, which when plucked comes off without the stem, hence the name dandi-cut. It grows in the crumbed soil of sun-cooked fields, which infuse the air with pepper mist. Rows of the dwarf plant are punctuated by figures at work in armfuls of ivory bangles and neon green cholis. This little fighter registers between 30,000 and 35,000 Scoville heat units which measure the concentration of natural capsaicin. That’s the kind of hot that will burn like chilli flakes on a pizza but won’t ruin your day.
Its aroma is so distinctive that it can be identified from afar by the breath-stopping kick it delivers to the top of the nose. But it has more bark than bite. Abbas Datwesh, a grower, picks a button-shaped one, pops it into his mouth and chews it as proof. “See,” he says, “it’s the flavour—not too spicy, not at all bitter.” This gustatory reputation was Pakistan’s calling card in international spice markets for decades and the reason it rules kitchens across Pakistan.
“This is what the world wants,” says grower and exporter Hamayoon Sattar. Kunri’s Mirch Mandi wholesale market trades over 100,000 tonnes of chillies every year. But Dundicut’s sales are collapsing. Its harvests have more than halved for two reasons: it doesn’t make enough money, and hybrid seeds do. Dundicut/Longi earns Rs100,000 in profit per acre, but the hybrid Sanam seed rakes in eight times that.
Nostalgic farmers keep growing Dundicut for their own kitchen but are finding it harder to justify the losses. As grower Abdul Jabbar puts it, “We haven’t abandoned our indigenous variety, our identity, Kunri’s identity. We are still very much waging this war with all the know-how and resources that we have.”
But the mood is more resigned at the Chilli Research Institute, where the fans do a bad job of fighting the 40-degree Celsius June heat. Growers like Sarwar Dars say they have reached the bitter conclusion that they have been fighting a losing battle on the climate front. But the real crisis is that the nation’s favourite chilli, that once made Pakistan the world’s fifth largest exporter, is poisoned.
The poison
Regardless of which chilli you grow, however, there is something in its powder that is reaching Pakistani kitchens that no one has told you about.
Aflatoxin B1 is a naturally occurring compound produced by the mold Aspergillus flavus that develops in decaying vegetation and soil. It is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, the highest category of confirmed cancer-causing agents, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Long-term exposure to it is associated with hepatocellular carcinoma and liver cancer.
Aflatoxin B1 is one of the most potent naturally occurring poisons known to science, and it is present in Pakistan’s red chilli powder.
The European Union’s legal maximum limit for aflatoxin B1 in dried chillies is 5 micrograms per kilogram and 10 µg/kg for total aflatoxins. However, Pakistani ground and crushed chilli products routinely show concentrations exceeding 80–90µg/kg—eight to nine times the EU’s total aflatoxin limit.
The consequences of this contamination are well-documented, says Dr Mohammed Siddiqui of the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council. Pakistani shipments have been returned. Buyers in regulated markets such as Europe and parts of the Gulf just look elsewhere for supplies.
Research from Kunri’s fields found that 67 per cent of six hybrid chilli blends had Aflatoxin B1, before harvest. One variety hit 600 µg/kg which is 120 times the European limit. Another study found that every single sample from 11 fields across Umerkot and Kunri taken over two contrasting years exceeded limits as well.
There is a detail in local packaging for certain branded chilli powder products that once you know, you cannot unsee. Their labels say: intended only for consumption within Pakistan. They can’t be sold abroad because they fail international safety standards. We, on the other hand, have no limits for aflatoxin in chillies at all.
How the poison spreads
Contamination begins in the field. After the harvest, the chillies spend days drying on the bare ground or soil. The air is rarely clean because a fine haze of rait rides in on the wind from Thar to settle on everything in sight.
In the day, the chillies absorb dust and heat. At night, they absorb humidity. If they are packed in plastic bags to be transported to mandi, fungus develops when their moisture mixes with the carbon dioxide that is released by a freshly picked chilli. According to PARC’s Dr Siddiqui, their quality starts deteriorating from thereon.
Farmers sometimes cause more damage when they stand on top of the chillies as they transport them to market in carts. “I often tell them,” Dr Siddiqui says, “that if chillies could speak, they would curse you.”
The solutions
An effort has been made to reduce contamination by ending open-ground drying. One experiment was with a solar tunnel dryer made of steel rods, sheets, a solar plate, battery, exhaust fan, and 100 drying trays. Traditional drying takes up to two weeks but the solar tunnel does it in five days, in controlled conditions. Aflatoxin levels fall. Quality rises. Prices improve.
The farmers saw it work. The dust accumulated visibly on the outer sheets of the tunnels instead of directly onto the drying chillies. PARC offered farmers 34 solar tunnel dryers, with a condition: farmers would contribute 20 per cent of the cost.
Fifty to sixty farmers showed up at the Export Development Fund seminar. When it came to the commitment, the majority walked away. Twenty-two remained. The government’s own processes did the rest. By the time tenders were approved and units were delivered, it was November. The season was over. Only two or three farmers used the dryers that year.
Before the solar tunnel dryers, there was a simpler solution. PARC had long advised farmers to keep freshly picked chillies under shade on a chattai, a mat of rushes that allows the carbon dioxide to escape, while reducing the heat that builds when chillies are packed together. There is also the method of tying a sheet a few feet above the ground to create a raised, ventilated surface that keeps the chilli off the soil entirely.
Hybrid seeds
In the Longi fields, farmers practice what international donor agencies would normally celebrate as an environmentally sustainable practice. When one particular plant shows extraordinary strength by standing taller than the rest, fruiting fuller, developing a deep vermillion red, the farmer will tie a strip of white cloth around its stem so it stands out in a sea of green. At harvest time, this plant’s seeds are separated from the rest, dried, and stored for next season when they go back in the ground.
“You watch the plant,” Jabbar says. “You know which one will give you something good.” Over generations, this technique has produced varieties finely tuned to their environment, soil, rainfall and temperature.
Hybrid seeds make this impossible because you have to keep buying new ones each season because they are cruelly engineered to produce inconsistent, lower-yielding offspring. Despite this, the more profitable Sanam crops persist as far as the eye can see in Kunri. Unlike the fat Dundicuts, these are long-fingered ruby pods that droop from short but upright stems. These hybrid seeds come from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Korea, and India (via Dubai) and farmers tend to prefer their Skyline 1, Skyline 2, Bayer 7864 F1, and Gold Star varieties.
“Their focus is on yield. Not on taste, not on aroma, but yield,“ says Dr Shahan Aziz, a food scientist at the University of Karachi. Breeders select two genetically distinct parent plants with the traits they want, and cross-pollinate them under controlled conditions (i.e. cover the female flower with a cap to prevent unwanted pollination, then manually introduce pollen from the chosen male plant). The flavour profile—the capsaicin, the aroma compounds, the particular heat that made the Dundicut famous—is not part of the breeding brief. The resulting generation, called F1, carries the dominant characteristics of both parents such as higher yield, more uniform fruiting and yes, greater disease resistance, but doesn’t taste the same.
However, a hybrid chilli bred in controlled conditions for Thai or Korean climates cannot perform as designed in Pakistan. Not only will it not be able to handle our climate change and rain patterns, but it will be resistant to disease in its countries of origin, not Pakistani fields. These foreign seeds thus carry no memory of Kunri’s soil or its seasons like the Dundicut, which has resilience encoded into its genetics after generations of selection. In fact, a 2017 study found that native seeds, including the Kunri type and Drooping type, showed resistance to bugs while commercial varieties such as Nagina were highly susceptible. The full picture, across all varieties, remains understudied.
Meanwhile, farmers like Malik Rizwan in Badin, who switched from native to hybrid seeds several seasons ago to make better profits, are beginning to struggle. “Now we pray it doesn’t rain,” he says because the foreign seed plants begin to die as soon as it does. Chillies have to be transplanted onto ridges to keep their roots above standing water. But if rainfall overwhelms drainage, disease is sure to follow. The post-rain moisture opens the door to safaid keera, a sucking pest, which infects plant after plant as a mosquito carries malaria.
At the Kunri mandi in June, bag after bag of dried chillies are stacked against the walls of the godowns. One of the sacks is ripped so a handful of dried chillies can be coaxed out. They are a mature red, but covered in blisters that look like cigarette burns. It is Sanam, the hybrid. The sacks of Longi mirch, on the other hand, are locked away inside the godowns, like treasure, for the few who know its value.
Header art by Mohsin Alam
