On the night of May 8, 2025, Pakistan sent roughly 300 to 400 drones toward 36 Indian locations, from Leh to Sir Creek. At the government’s joint briefing the next day, the Ministry of External Affairs and the armed forces said debris analysis pointed to Turkish-made Songar drones, built by the Ankara-based firm Asisguard. Ankara had already made its position plain, expressing solidarity with Pakistan within hours of Operation Sindoor.
India reacted within days. On May 15, the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security revoked the security clearance of Çelebi, the Turkish company whose Indian arm ran ground handling at major airports, “in the interest of national security”. Delhi’s Azadpur Mandi, Asia’s largest wholesale fruit market, stopped placing new orders for Turkish apples. Traders in Pune extended their refusal to Turkish apricots and hazelnuts. A distributors’ federation said its network of about 13 million grocery shops would pull Turkish chocolates and cosmetics from shelves. Travel bookings to Turkey fell by about 60%.
Then the moment passed, as moments do. Foreign office consultations resumed this April after four years in abeyance. Turkey bought record volumes of diesel from India this August. The apples and the marble quietly found their way back into the trade statistics. Delhi’s High Court upheld the Çelebi revocation in July 2025, citing “the necessity to eliminate the possibility of espionage”, but the diplomatic temperature has been falling for months.
Only one question from that angry week was never really asked: of everything India imports, which line is most dependent on Turkey? Not apples. Not marble. Hazelnuts, and it is not close.
The dependence, in numbers
Our desk research, built from UN Comtrade data and trade analytics, puts hard figures on a dependency most Indians have never thought about:
- In calendar 2024, India imported about 339 tonnes of shelled hazelnuts worth $2.64 million. Turkey supplied essentially 100% of it.
- In the twelve months to October 2025, imports were about 388 tonnes worth $3.49 million, with Turkey holding 98.17% of the value. The only meaningful new entrant was Georgia, at 12 tonnes.
- Demand is compounding at roughly 21% a year over five years, in both volume and value.
- The average import price reached about $8,992 per tonne in that 12-month window, up about 16% year on year, after a 33.6% jump in 2024. Two all-time monthly price records were set in the period.
- On top of the price sits the tariff stack: 30% basic customs duty, a 10% social welfare surcharge on the duty, and 5% IGST on dried nuts.
India, in other words, pays a premium price and a heavy duty for a nut that nobody in the country grows commercially.
The true dependency is larger than these figures, and deliberately hard to see. Shelled kernels are the only hazelnut-specific line in the customs tariff. Hazelnut pastes, pralines and finished spreads enter India inside broader categories that public data cannot split. For scale: India’s hazelnut-chocolate spread retail market alone was estimated at about $255 million in 2024 – roughly seventy times the kernel import line. Most of the hazelnuts India consumes arrive hidden inside finished goods, and nobody can currently say how much of that traces back to Turkish raw material.
Globally, India is a rounding error: about 0.13% of world shelled-hazelnut imports. Turkey grows about 59% of world output and holds about 62% of shelled-kernel export value, with a grower base of some 400,000 families. India has no bargaining power in this market. It is a price-taker with one supplier.
The supplier is building this dependence on purpose
This is the part that deserves more attention than it gets. Turkish dependence is not an accident of taste. It is the product of an organised, state-backed export campaign.
The Turkish Hazelnut Exporters’ Associations formally launched in India in August 2024 with a four-year demand-building campaign, co-hosted with India’s own dry-fruit trade body. Within two months, Haldiram’s had launched an eight-item hazelnut mithai line with the association, priced around ₹4,000 a kilo, in time for Diwali 2024. Turkish trade press openly describes India as the priority market as European demand flattens.
The campaign ran straight through the boycott year. This August, Turkish exporters held a B2B networking session in New Delhi, where the chairman of the Black Sea Hazelnut and Products Exporters’ Association declared that India “has moved past being viewed as merely an export market and is now a strategic long-term partner in growing the category.” The event’s publicity claimed Turkey’s hazelnut exports to India surged 172% between 2020 and 2025, from 352 to 985 tonnes.
That 985-tonne claim cannot be reconciled with India’s own import records, which show about 390 tonnes in the latest twelve months. One of the two numbers is wrong, and India should care enough to find out which – a point we return to below.
None of this is illegitimate. Turkey is doing exactly what a smart exporting country should do. The question is whether India has any plan of its own.
Why this particular supplier is a strategic question
The case for acting on this dependency does not rest on sentiment. It rests on a documented record, and on arithmetic.
The record first. In May 2025, the Indian government said Pakistani drone intrusions across 36 locations used Turkish-made Songar drones. Turkey has handed Pakistan two MILGEM-class corvettes, PNS Babur in 2023 and PNS Khaibar in December 2025, and the two countries restructured a reported $900 million drone deal after Operation Sindoor. President Erdogan has raised Kashmir at the UN General Assembly repeatedly since 2019; he did so again this September, drawing a public rebuttal from the MEA, and Turkey sits in the OIC Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir. On August 7 this year, Turkey signed the Makkah joint defence agreement with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, under which an armed attack on one signatory is treated as an attack on all.
India’s own response shows it takes this seriously. The Çelebi revocation of May 2025 was the first direct commercial action against a Turkish firm on national-security grounds, and the Delhi High Court upheld it. The company says the decision wiped out up to $500 million in value.
Now the arithmetic, stated honestly. India runs a trade surplus with Turkey: about $2.2 billion in FY26, with exports of $4.54 billion against imports of $2.34 billion. The relationship is thawing – talks resumed in April, trade routes are being rebuilt, and Turkey has cooperated in extraditing fugitives wanted by Indian agencies. This article is not a call for a boycott or a trade war, both of which would hurt Indian exporters and consumers.
The argument is narrower, and harder to dismiss: near-total single-origin dependence, on any country, for a fast-growing consumption category is a vulnerability that outlasts the diplomatic weather. Hazelnuts happen to be the purest case of it in India’s import basket – 98% from one origin, growing 21% a year, with the supplier state running a funded campaign to deepen it. If ties are genuinely mending, this calm is exactly when India should fix the structural problem, because calm is when fixing things is cheapest.
Four tracks out, honestly graded
The desk research behind this article graded every option against evidence, including the evidence that cuts against the case.
Track 1 – Diversify origins. Start now; this is proven. Georgia landed about 12 tonnes in India in the first ten months of 2025 at roughly 44% below Turkish proxy prices, and it shares Turkey’s Black Sea climate. Chile harvests counter-seasonally and already punches above its weight in world kernel exports. Azerbaijan, the United States and Italy are established origins. What this takes is unglamorous: Indian importers qualifying two or three alternative suppliers, building landed-cost comparisons (freight plus 30% duty plus surcharges plus IGST), and buyers testing samples. This is a procurement programme, not an industrial project. It could start diluting the 98% within one or two buying seasons.
Track 2 – Process in India. The fastest industrial step. A domestic hazelnut-ingredient trade already exists – Indian firms market hazelnut pastes and praline pastes from Mumbai to Bengaluru – though which of them actually manufacture, versus repack imports, needs factory-level verification. The 30% duty wall rewards any value addition done inside India. Roasting and grinding imported kernels (of any origin) into paste and ingredients here captures margin, builds skills and creates the industrial buyer base that a future Indian crop would need. Ferrero’s Baramati plant, its Asia hub, shows scale food manufacturing works in India. Food-processing schemes such as PMFME could plausibly support a unit of this kind.
Track 3 – Grow our own. A research programme, not an investment case. India is not starting from zero. A wild hazelnut, Corylus jacquemontii, grows across the north-western Himalaya from Kashmir to Kumaon at 1,800 to 3,300 metres. SKUAST-Kashmir researchers who evaluated 35 genotypes between 2020 and 2022 found indigenous trees yielding 11.5 to 20.8 kg per tree, against 5.6 to 9.3 kg for exotic varieties – promising raw material for a breeding programme. ICAR’s own publications flag Uttarakhand, Himachal and the high-hill North-East as climatically suitable.
But the honest record also says: there is not a single commercial European hazelnut orchard in India; trees take three to seven years to bear; spring frost is a live risk to Himalayan flowering; landed Turkish kernels cost about $9,000 a tonne before duty, so an Indian-grown kernel must beat roughly ₹10-11 lakh a tonne at the factory gate to win on cost; and Ferrero spent about $143.5 million trying to grow hazelnuts commercially in Australia before abandoning the attempt in 2023 when the climate proved unsuitable. Anyone selling “grow it ourselves” as a quick answer is selling hype. The right move is what the science already asks for: multi-year, replicated cultivar trials with ICAR-CITH Srinagar, SKUAST-K and Dr YS Parmar University in Solan, and a decision after the data, not before.
Track 4 – Measure and expose. The transparency track. India cannot currently state its own hazelnut dependency with confidence. Paste and spread imports hide in basket categories. Duty aggregators publicly disagree on the tariff. And the Turkish promotion board’s 985-tonne export claim and India’s official ~390-tonne import record cannot both be right. Somebody’s numbers are off, and it should not be possible for a foreign trade board to know more about India’s consumption than India does. An open import-dependency tracker – by category, origin and company – would let citizens, journalists and policymakers see every single-origin dependence in one place. Hazelnuts are the case study, not the whole list.
Why is TIES writing about a nut?
TIES, operated by Tiesverse Foundation, is a youth-led Research, Media and Technology organisation in New Delhi producing evidence-based work on issues of strategic importance to India.
TIES operates on a defined RMT (Research, Media and Technology) cycle. It identifies a problem that merits attention, researches it rigorously, and establishes what the evidence supports. It then communicates and advocates its findings to those positioned to act on them, chiefly government institutions and corporations, and to the general public through its own media and partnered distribution channels. Finally, it assesses whether a concrete outcome is feasible, including but not limited to a policy recommendation, a public report, a partnership or a technology product.
Work is carried out by small cross-functional cells in which research, media and technology function as a single team around one problem.
This article is a result of one of the Research-Media-Tech model(RMT Model) topics we’re working on this quarter.
The connection to India’s 2047 goal is direct
Strategic autonomy is usually discussed in the language of semiconductors and warships. But the habit of dependence forms in small categories where nobody bothers to look, and a $3.5 million import line is where the habit is cheapest to break. A nation that wants strategic autonomy by 2047 has to practise it somewhere. The small lines are where practice is cheap.
What we ask of the Indian government
Five modest, constructive asks – no bans, no tariff wars:
- Measure it. Publish a DGCIS-backed estimate of India’s true hazelnut dependency, including the paste and finished-spread categories that current public data cannot split.
- Diversify it. Put alternative nut origins – Georgia and Chile first – on trade-talk agendas, and align standards so new origins clear Indian food-safety checks faster.
- Process it. Bring nut-ingredient manufacturing explicitly within food-processing incentives, so the 30% duty wall rewards value addition in India rather than merely taxing Indian consumers.
- Trial it. Fund multi-year replicated hazelnut cultivar trials in the Himalayan belt through ICAR-CITH, SKUAST-K and YSPUHF Solan. Research funding, not subsidy promises. Let the data decide.
- Resist the shortcut. A ban or punitive tariff on a $3.5 million line would tax Indian consumers, invite retaliation against India’s $4.5 billion of exports to Turkey, and solve nothing. Substitution beats symbolism.
What an ordinary reader can do
- Check the origin on the label. Ask brands where their hazelnuts come from. Companies notice being asked.
- If you run a bakery, café or mithai business: ask your supplier for a Georgian or Chilean quote. The asking itself moves markets.
- If you are in the hill states: watch the trial results coming out of SKUAST-K and ICAR-CITH. The cultivation question will be answered by data from your hills in the next few years.
- And build the reflex that this article is really about: where does this come from, and what does that dependence cost us?
A hazelnut will never matter as much as a semiconductor or a warship. That is exactly why it is the right place to start. Dependencies this small, this measurable and this one-sided do not stay this fixable for long.
