At a time when potato growers in the state are not getting a good price for their produce, the West Bengal government has asked them to shift focus to other cash crops like oilseeds and corn.
Rabindranath Bhattacharya, state?s agriculture minister, said, ?We are asking potato growers to shift to alternative cash crops like oilseeds, corn and cereals. We are anticipating that area under potato cultivation will substantially come down in 2012,? he said.
In districts like Bankura farmers have already started thinking of growing alternative crops. Sources in the state agriculture department said that farmers in the district had kept almost 38 lakh packets of potato in 44 cold storages. Almost 26% of that is still lying inside the storages.
According to sources, almost 6 lakh tonne potato is lying unsold in the cold storages. State agriculture marketing minister Arup Roy had convened a meeting last week and requested the big retail chains to procure potato from the farmers. According to sources, retail majors like Reliance, Spencer?s and Metro Cash & Carry attended the meeting.?The food department will start procuring some potato through mid day meal schemes. Apart from that we are also looking at increasing potato exports to other states,? said Roy.
?Potato production in the state touched 120 lakh tonne against 90 lakh tonne last year. The over-supply situation can be tackled only by increasing exports,? Roy said. This year farmers had kept potato at a rate of R240-250 per 50 kg bag. The prices have come down to R70-80 per bag at present.
Price of potato in Bankura has gone down to R120-130 per 50 kg bag.The farmers kept potato at R240 R50 kg bag and paid rentals at R149 per quintal on top of that.
?Potato market in the northern region is now being controlled by Uttar Pradesh. It has captured the market in Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh after it started selling potato at a lower price,? said an agriculture department official.
?We don?t have any mechanism to control price of potato. Demand for exports is not very strong to support a bumper crop. So we have asked farmers to go for alternative crops this year,? Bhattacharya said.