Bengaluru, India – When Bengaluru-based Ghanaian student Desmond Akwai misses his family in Accra, he gets on a video call with them over a meal, and they eat the exact same rice dish on both sides. “Because we’re all eating Indian rice, it feels like we’re sharing a meal, even though we’re so far apart,” the 23-year-old postgraduate student of commerce said.
It isn’t just Akwai’s family that comes together over Indian rice. By far the world’s largest exporter of the cereal, India is the single biggest source of rice both for wealthy Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and for developing nations in West Africa like Ghana, Benin and Togo. China, which started importing rice from India only a few years ago, now counts the South Asian nation as its single biggest supplier.
