How the West Asia conflict reshaped Kerala's Onam exports

Every August, Kerala's farmers pick bananas a little early, flower growers cut marigold and chethi (jungle geranium) before they fully bloom, and traders bundle banana leaves in wet cloth to keep them fresh. All of it is timed to reach one place in one day: the Onam dining tables of Malayali families across the Middle East.

Onam is Kerala's harvest festival, and its centrepiece is the Onasadhya, a vegetarian feast served on a banana leaf. For the roughly one million Keralites living in the Gulf, that meal has to taste like home, which means the ingredients have to come from home. That single expectation turns Onam into one of the busiest weeks of the year for Kerala's airports.

This year, the story is not just about festival demand. It is about that demand colliding with a supply chain still shaken by conflict in West Asia, where airspace closures and shipping risk earlier in 2026 have made exporters far more careful about how they move goods to the Gulf.

What moves, and how
Kaushal Khakhar, CEO of Kay Bee Exports, one of India's largest fruit and vegetable exporters, said demand for this Onam has stayed strongest for produce tied to the festival's cooking, including amla (Indian gooseberry), drumstick (moringa pods), valleri (cucumber) and karela (bitter gourd), alongside sweet potato. Akbar Sheikh, Associate Vice President at Galaxy Freight in Kochi, gave the fuller list: Nendran banana, a plantain variety grown widely in Kerala, small onion, beans, drumstick, snake gourd, tindly (ivy gourd), papaya, green mango, banana leaves, curry leaves, tender jackfruit, marigold and chethi flowers, and banana chips.

Not all of it travels the same way. Sea freight is far cheaper, but items with a short shelf life cannot afford the five to seven days a ship takes to reach the Gulf. Sheikh said his firm sends flowers, banana leaves, curry leaves and cut vegetables by air, while banana chips, payasam (a traditional sweet milk pudding) mix, pickles and pappadam (poppadoms), which last longer, go by sea. Khakhar put it more starkly: Kay Bee ships all of its Gulf-bound perishables by air, even though most exporters lean on sea freight to save cost. "These products have a short shelf life, and air freight enables us to reduce transit time and provide greater assurance on quality when the produce reaches the customer," he said.

A genuine peak, by the numbers
Cochin International Airport, known as CIAL and Kerala's busiest cargo gateway, expected to handle around 1,678 metric tonnes of cargo through scheduled flights in the week of 17 to 23 August, including 1,173 tonnes of perishables, with 300 tonnes forecast on each peak day. Sheikh said a normal August day at CIAL sees roughly 83 to 85 tonnes, which makes a 300-tonne peak day close to four times the usual volume.

CIAL has responded by adding capacity mid-season. IndiGo CarGo launched a new scheduled freighter service between Kochi and Sharjah, starting at one flight a week with plans to reach three, alongside existing non-scheduled freighters run by National Airlines and IndiGo. CIAL Managing Director S Suhas linked the move to the Kerala government's push to develop Kochi as a logistics hub.

The conflict that changed the calculation
Since February 2026, escalating conflict in West Asia, including strikes on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has made both sea and air routes to the Gulf less predictable. Container rates on Middle East trades rose sharply, and several shipping lines began routing around Africa instead of through the Red Sea.

Sheikh said this pushed a larger share of this year's Onam cargo onto aircraft than usual. Sea reliability dropped during the crisis, with consignments stranded at sea and liner charges to the Gulf jumping from around 700 dollars to 1,500 dollars per container. "Exporters lost confidence in the sea for festive peaks," he said. Air rates out of Kochi spiked to around 215 rupees a kilo against a normal 60 rupees during the worst of the disruption, before settling, though Sheikh said rates remain up by about 15 rupees a kilo, and space stays tight partly because Gulf-bound passenger flights are full of returning expatriate travellers.

Exporters have responded by booking earlier. Sheikh said space is now locked 10 to 12 days ahead, against three to four days in a normal year. Khakhar described booking around a week ahead for Kay Bee's most perishable shipments, with both capacity and rates under pressure through the festive window.

Why aircraft are carrying less cargo, not more
Part of the squeeze has nothing to do with how much produce is being grown. BN Rajmoghon, Managing Director of Thiruvananthapuram-based Anand Freight said airlines flying into the Gulf are now instructed to carry enough fuel to return to base immediately if a security situation develops mid-flight, rather than refuelling at a Gulf airport. That extra fuel weight comes directly out of cargo space. On one widebody route he tracks, he said capacity has fallen from around 30 tonnes to about 20 tonnes, forcing airlines to ration space between the Gulf and other long-haul markets such as the UK, the US and Europe.

One gateway surging, another going quiet
Kochi has absorbed the shock and kept growing. Thiruvananthapuram has gone the other way. Suresh Kumar, CEO of Classic India Logistics, based in Thiruvananthapuram, described a season unlike any other. Emirates flights out of the city are departing with far less cargo than usual, he said, not because demand has fallen but because the airline appears to be holding back space to push prices higher. A flight that would normally carry 25 tonnes is now carrying about 12 tonnes, he said, while charges to Dubai have more than doubled, from around 85 rupees to 185 rupees a kilo. "This time, exporters are not sending any cargo," he said, describing shippers turning instead to Mumbai or to sea freight.

Rajmoghon's account points the same way. He said Thiruvananthapuram’s cargo capacity has always trailed Kochi's, since passenger flights there leave little room for freight once luggage is loaded, and most major exporters now prefer routing through Kochi, where CIAL's expanded freighter schedule offers more reliable space. He pointed to IndiGo's new freighter, carrying around 55 tonnes to Fujairah, and a single Lulu Group charter that he said moved 110 tonnes in one flight, as evidence that big buyers are increasingly securing their own dedicated capacity out of Kochi.

Not every operator described a squeeze. Kochat Narendran, President of freighter airline Afcom, said his scheduled Middle East operations out of Mumbai and Chennai have been running full for three weeks, into Dubai World Central (DWC). He was cautious about crediting Onam specifically, since his routes carry general cargo rather than Kerala produce alone, but said festive demand for flowers and Kerala food items has added to an already strong flow of exports to the Gulf. He also pointed to a wider imbalance: with few flights currently arriving in the Gulf from Europe and the US because of the conflict, outbound cargo from India has grown strongly while the return leg stays light, a gap airlines make up through higher outbound pricing.

Keeping produce fresh, and looking for a way around the risk
Sheikh said Galaxy Freight has added refrigerated trucking from the Thrissur and Kottayam belt into CIAL, night shift consolidation with extra staff for sorting and grading, and pre-cooling with priority customs clearance at the airport. Khakhar said the biggest bottleneck is not any single point but managing the cold chain consistently through a compressed peak. "Even when produce is sourced on time, delays in airport handling or uplift can affect freshness," he said.

Some shippers are testing alternatives. Sheikh said sea cargo is being routed through Mumbai and airlifted onward to avoid demurrage on stranded ships, while some volume is going through Bengaluru or Chennai for widebody connections, despite higher clearance costs. Even so, Kochi remains the preferred gateway, since around 60 percent of Kerala's air cargo already moves through CIAL. Rajmoghon added that the deep-water port at Vizhinjam, near Thiruvananthapuram, could eventually cut sea transit to the Gulf to around five days once fully operational, though that is likely still a year or two away, and sailings from the port remain limited for now.

One friction point sits outside the conflict entirely. Kumar said an 18% goods and services tax applies to international air freight, meaning that on a shipment costing 400 rupees a kilo to Europe, roughly 72 rupees a kilo goes to the government as tax. Refunds meant to arrive within seven days are instead taking two to three months, he said, straining smaller exporters' cash flow at the time of year they need it most.

What this Onam actually shows
Kerala's Onam export rush has not disappeared this year, but it has changed shape. Kochi has become the clear centre of gravity, adding freighter capacity fast enough to match both festival demand and the caution forced on airlines by conflict risk. Thiruvananthapuram has seen exporters step back from air freight altogether, priced out or squeezed out of space, and shift instead towards Mumbai or the sea.

What ties both stories together is the same fact. A war playing out over the Strait of Hormuz, far from any banana farm in Kerala, is now shaping how much fuel a captain carries, how early an exporter has to book, and ultimately how a banana leaf makes it onto a dinner table in Dubai in time for Thiruvonam.