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However, geopolitical dynamics are inherently uncertain and often transient. Consequently, commitments that may initially appear credible may lose their viability when conditions change. Climate money expands in periods of cooperation. But it contracts under geopolitical stress. And right now, stress is all we have.

The NCQG, which replaces the failed $100 billion commitment from Copenhagen 2009, aims to mobilise $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 from public, private, and multilateral sources. On paper, this is pragmatic. Fiscal constraints mean public money alone cannot bridge the gap. Private capital must be crowded in. Multilateral development banks must lend more. But pragmatism becomes delusion when it ignores how finance actually behaves under pressure.

Here is the uncomfortable truth that no COP communiqué admits: Green finance is neither recession-proof nor war-proof. When geopolitical tensions rise, capital flees to safety. Governments reallocate budgets toward defence, energy security and industrial policy. Long-term climate commitments which require stable, predictable finance over decades compete with immediate political priorities. And they lose. The $ 100 billion goal was undermined by inconsistent definitions, inflated accounting and uneven allocation. The $1.3 trillion goal faces something more dangerous: A world where the rules of cooperation are breaking down.

The NCQG’s reliance on private finance assumes that public interventions can reliably crowd in capital at scale. But developing economies face persistent regulatory uncertainty, currency volatility and weak institutional frameworks all of which translate into higher risk premiums. Capital flows where returns are predictable, not where climate needs are most urgent. This is the mobilization trap: Finance gets counted, but not delivered in forms that are accessible or affordable. The $ 100 billion experiment proved that. There is no reason to believe $ 1.3 trillion will be different.

Even if the money arrives, it arrives skewed. Historically, climate finance has concentrated on mitigation through renewable energy, where revenue streams are clearer, while adaptation remains chronically underfunded. The NCQG does not fix this imbalance, rather, it risks widening it. Worse, by expanding the pool of contributors to include private actors and multilateral banks, the new framework dilutes accountability. The $300 billion floor is tied to developed countries. The remaining $1 trillion depends on mobilisation, a word that has historically meant less scrutiny, not more.

For India, this is not an abstract debate. The country’s development trajectory demands a delicate balance between rapid growth and deep decarbonization. According to estimates from the NITI Aayog report, the financial requirements may reach approximately $ 6.5 trillion over the coming decades to realise the critical double pivots. But access to affordable, reliable finance is precisely what the NCQG cannot guarantee. If climate money retreats during the next global crisis and there will be a next crisis, India will be left holding a transition plan without the capital to execute it. Rather than identifying the issue as a funding gap, it is wise to address this as a design flaw.

The NCQG was supposed to be the moment climate finance grew up moving from billions to trillions, from aid to investment, from developed-country charity to global mobilisation. But scale without resilience is just a larger target to miss. The test is not whether $1.3 trillion can be pledged. It is whether those pledges can survive the next war, the next recession, the next realignment of alliances. Without institutional arrangements that lock in commitments beyond political cycles, the world will repeat the same mistake: Scaling ambition and scaling the gap between promise and delivery.

This article is authored by Suvajit Banerjee, fellow, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi and Stutii Srivastava, financial analyst, University College London. Views are personal.

Improving standards compliance, institutional coordination, and farmer-market linkages is critical for enhancing India’s competitiveness in global agri-food trade

India stands at a pivotal moment in global agri-food trade. It is among the world’s largest producers of rice, milk, spices, fruits, fisheries, and several horticulture products, yet its share in global agricultural exports remains modest at around 2.2 per cent. The contradiction is striking: a country with vast production capacity still struggles to fully translate its agricultural strength into sustained global competitiveness.

The challenge is no longer merely about producing more. It is about building resilient, traceable, standards-compliant, and globally integrated agricultural value chains. As international trade increasingly revolves around quality assurance, sustainability, food safety, and logistics efficiency, India must move beyond the traditional “farm-to-market” approach toward a modern “farm-to-global-market” framework.

At the core of this transformation lies value chain strengthening. Indian agriculture continues to be fragmented, dominated by smallholders, and characterised by weak aggregation systems. A substantial share of produce passes through multiple intermediaries before reaching processors or exporters, eroding farmer margins and compromising quality consistency. In several commodities, post-harvest losses remain significant due to inadequate cold chains, storage infrastructure, and grading systems.

This fragmentation becomes particularly costly in export markets, where buyers demand uniformity, traceability, and reliable delivery schedules. Countries competing with India in agri-food exports—such as Vietnam, Thailand, Brazil, and the Netherlands—have invested heavily in integrated supply chains linking farmers, processors, logistics providers, certification agencies, and exporters. India’s agricultural competitiveness will increasingly depend on whether it can replicate similar ecosystem efficiencies.

Evidence from an NCAER study on agro-processing cooperatives and institutional financing further highlights the structural weaknesses in India’s agricultural value chains. The study, covering 304 cooperative units across states including Assam, Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra, and West Bengal, found that marginal and small farmers continue to sell a major share of their produce to private traders due to weak aggregation systems and inadequate storage infrastructure. As a result, farmers often fail to benefit from favourable price movements even during bumper harvests. The study also observed that nearly 34 per cent of surveyed agro-processing units were operating below optimal capacity because of irregular raw material supply, shortage of skilled manpower, weak market demand, and limited access to modern machinery. These findings underline the urgent need for stronger producer organisations, cooperative processing systems, warehousing networks, and integrated supply chains to improve India’s export competitiveness.

Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs), cooperatives, and agri-tech platforms can play a transformative role here. Aggregation at the producer level not only improves bargaining power but also facilitates standardisation, contract farming, digital traceability, and certification compliance. Strengthening linkages between farmers and food processing industries is equally important, especially for high-value exports such as fruits, vegetables, marine products, spices, dairy, and organic produce.

However, stronger value chains alone are insufficient if market access barriers continue to constrain exports. Increasingly, global trade barriers are shifting away from tariffs toward non-tariff measures, particularly Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regulations and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT). These standards govern pesticide residues, food safety, animal and plant health, packaging norms, traceability, and sustainability practices.

For Indian exporters, SPS compliance has emerged as one of the most critical bottlenecks. Studies indicate that SPS notifications and trade-related standards can significantly reduce agricultural exports from developing economies by increasing compliance costs and uncertainty. Export consignments from India have periodically faced rejections in advanced markets due to issues relating to residue levels, contamination, or documentation gaps. Such incidents not only cause immediate economic losses but also affect long-term credibility in international markets.

The problem is not that standards are unnecessary. On the contrary, food safety and biosecurity are legitimate global concerns. The issue is that India’s compliance ecosystem remains uneven across regions and commodities. Many small and medium exporters lack access to internationally accredited laboratories, real-time testing facilities, traceability systems, and technical advisory support. Compliance is often treated as an end-stage formality rather than being embedded throughout the value chain.

India therefore requires a strategic shift from reactive compliance to proactive standards competitiveness. This calls for substantial investments in testing infrastructure, digital traceability systems, residue monitoring, cold-chain logistics, and certification ecosystems aligned with global benchmarks such as Codex Alimentarius and WTO SPS frameworks. Export-oriented clusters for specific commodities—such as grapes, shrimp, spices, mangoes, and basmati rice—can serve as models for integrated standards-driven production systems.

Equally important is institutional coordination. India’s agri-trade governance is spread across multiple ministries and agencies including the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Commerce, APEDA, FSSAI, MPEDA, DGFT, state departments, and commodity boards. While each institution performs an important function, coordination gaps often create delays, duplication, and regulatory uncertainty for exporters.

A fragmented institutional architecture is particularly problematic in global trade negotiations and standards diplomacy. Developed economies increasingly shape market access through regulatory frameworks, sustainability norms, and private standards. India needs stronger inter-agency coordination to anticipate emerging global requirements, negotiate equivalence agreements, and support exporters in adapting to evolving standards.

Trade agreements must also move beyond tariff discussions to include regulatory cooperation, mutual recognition arrangements, and SPS harmonisation. Research on SPS barriers suggests that many advanced trade agreements now incorporate deeper regulatory coordination mechanisms, whereas India’s approach has historically remained limited to reiterating WTO provisions. Future trade strategies must therefore integrate market intelligence, standards negotiations, and export facilitation into a unified framework.

There is also a domestic dimension to this debate. Agricultural exports should not be viewed merely as foreign exchange earners, but as catalysts for rural transformation. Stronger agri-food value chains can generate non-farm employment, stimulate food processing, improve farmer incomes, encourage crop diversification, and reduce post-harvest wastage. Export-linked agriculture often creates incentives for higher quality production, better infrastructure, and improved logistics that benefit domestic markets as well.

India’s demographic and dietary transitions globally also present an opportunity. Rising demand for processed foods, nutritionally diverse products, sustainable sourcing, marine products, organic food, and ready-to-eat segments opens new export avenues. India possesses natural advantages in many of these sectors due to climatic diversity, large production bases, and labour availability. But comparative advantage alone no longer guarantees market success. Competitiveness now depends on reliability, quality assurance, logistics efficiency, and institutional responsiveness.

The next phase of India’s agricultural transformation must therefore be export-oriented, standards-driven, and value-chain centric. Production surpluses without market integration will yield diminishing returns. What India needs is an integrated agri-trade strategy that links farmers to global consumers through efficient logistics, strong institutions, compliance ecosystems, and modern supply chains.

India’s competitiveness in global agri-food trade will ultimately depend not only on production volumes, but on its ability to build coordinated institutions, farmer-centric aggregation systems, modern processing infrastructure, and standards-compliant value chains. In the coming decade, global agri-food trade will increasingly reward countries that can combine scale with standards. India has the scale. The challenge now is to build the systems that make that scale globally competitive.

Saurabh Bandyopadhyay and Laxmi Joshi work with NCAER. Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.