Feb 15: Although the International Jute Organisation is the global apex body for jute growing and consuming nations, its role, till recently, was losing significance as several nations felt that they would be better off dealing with the issues on their own.As a result, jute goods producers and consumers often interacted among themselves regarding different aspects of the business. Even in cases where both sides, manufacturers and consumers, faced certain problems, they failed to sort it out among themselves. One such issue was finalisation of international standards for jute bags used for packaging food material.
Here, the IJO made a successful intervention. In a workshop organised in Calcutta last week, the IJO made jute producers sit together with producers and customers of cocoa and coffee products and iron out the irritants. This process was carefully planned and worked out by Henri L Jason, the director of IJO. Before placing the final draft of the workshop to participants, Jason had a short, butinformative conversation, with Kohinoor Mandal, where he discussed the plans of the organisation and its problems.
Calcutta is the heart of Indian jute industry, but we rarely hear about the activities of the IJO. Is it because Indians are not too involved with the organisation or is it that the organisation is facing other problems?
Well, to start off, I must admit that though the IJO is the world apex body of five jute exporting and 20 importing countries and the European Union, we have still not initiated many activities in the jute sector. This has marginally reduced our significance in the industry. Individual countries also prefer to work on their own. Moreover, the organisation also has some problems regarding the funding of its jute development programme.
For example, India arranged a UNDP funding of $46 million about five years back. In our 15 years of existence, the total grants received from our member nations is less than that amount. In this sort of a situation, the IJO was losing itssignificance. Maybe that's why you have not heard much of us.
However you must be quite pleased with the successful workshop on ensuring hydrocarbon-free jute bags in Calcutta?
This workshop is a perfect example to prove the role of international organisations like IJO. Member countries may hold different opinions but we showed what role we can play in these international seminars. I doubt whether any individual jute millowner would have been able to meet all these cocoa and coffee producers and consumers.
It appears that the Indian jute industry has scored a major victory over their Bangladeshi counterparts in the hydrocarbon-free jute bags market. What will be the role of IJO now?
Well, it is true that Indians have certain advantages over their counterparts in hydrocarbon-free bags, but the Bangladeshis are also not way behind. They have also replaced jute batching oil with rapeseed oil or soyabean oil. For IJO, we are not left with much work on the issue of hydrocarbon-free bags. At the workshopwe had already drafted the final specifications and now it is up to the international councils of jute, cocoa and coffee for adoption. Individual countries will identify their own monitoring agencies and we will not interfere. However, I must add that the major winner is the jute industry. When the producers are shifting to bulk movement of goods, we have been able to bring them back to jute bags and that too when we are constantly being threatened by the synthetic industry.
Are you planning any development programme for the jute industry?Yes we have planned a new jute development programme which will cost around $38 million, with the small and medium scale sector in focus. The programme is divided into different groups and sub-groups. For funds we are approaching a number of organisations, presenting the total programme and asking them to give money for the project.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
