Pulses

Start with the definition, because it is narrower than it looks and it explains the numbers. A pulse is the dried edible seed of a legume: lentils, chickpeas, dry peas, dry beans, faba beans, pigeon peas, cowpeas, mung beans. The category deliberately excludes legumes grown mainly for oil, which is why soybeans and groundnuts are not pulses despite being legumes and having their own sheets here, and it excludes legumes eaten fresh as vegetables, which is why green peas and green beans are not pulses either. That boundary is why published world production figures range from around 60 million tonnes to nearly 100 depending on what the compiler counted; on the FAO definition the crop runs on the order of 90 million tonnes a year.

The map has an oddity at its centre: the largest producer is also the largest importer. India grows roughly a quarter of the world's pulses, eats about 27 percent of them, and still takes something like 14 percent of world imports, because domestic consumption keeps outrunning domestic production. Pulses are the primary protein for a very large vegetarian population, and dal is not a side dish but a staple. Canada is the largest exporter, built on red lentils and dry peas from the prairies. Australia ships chickpeas, lentils, and faba beans, Myanmar pigeon peas and mung beans, and Russia, the United States, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Brazil fill out the trade.

That structure makes pulses the most policy-driven crop in this book. When the largest producer is also the swing importer, its government's tariff decisions set the world price, and Indian pulse policy changes often, at short notice, and in both directions. The 2017-18 tariff wall is the textbook case; India has since repeatedly adjusted duties on yellow peas, chickpeas, and lentils as domestic harvests and food-price politics move. A Canadian or Australian grower planting in the spring is taking a position not primarily on rainfall but on a decision that will be taken in New Delhi months later, and there is no instrument anywhere that hedges a tariff.

The agronomy is the other half of the story and connects this sheet to the fertilizer group. Pulses are legumes, so they fix their own nitrogen from the air through root-nodule bacteria, which means they need little or no nitrogen fertiliser and they leave residual nitrogen in the soil for the crop that follows. A pulse in the rotation therefore cuts the fertiliser bill twice, and it breaks disease cycles in cereal-heavy ground. This is why pulse area often expands when urea and ammonia prices spike: the crop is a partial substitute for a fertiliser input as much as it is a food. It is also why pulses feature in nearly every argument about lower-emissions agriculture, since nitrogen fertiliser manufacture and application is one of the larger emission sources in farming.

Nutritionally pulses run about 20 to 25 percent protein, roughly double most cereals, with fibre and micronutrients and a very low price per gram of protein, which is why they anchor diets across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. The United Nations named 2016 the International Year of Pulses, largely on that food-security argument. A newer and much smaller demand stream comes from the West: pea protein isolate, extracted from yellow peas, became the base of a wave of plant-based meat and drink products. That trade matters less for tonnage than for what it did to pea demand expectations, and for the starch it leaves behind as a co-product, which is itself now the subject of trade disputes.

There is no futures market for any pulse anywhere, and the reasons are structural rather than accidental. The category is not one commodity but several unrelated crops, each split further by class, colour, size, and grade: a red lentil, a green lentil, a kabuli chickpea, a desi chickpea, and a yellow pea are different goods with different buyers. The export trade sits with a modest number of merchants who are already long the physical. And the dominant risk is political, which no contract can transfer. Pricing therefore runs off trade quotations, Canadian and Australian grower bids, and delivered offers into the Indian subcontinent, with growers managing risk through forward contracts to processors and through rotation choices rather than on a screen.