Farmers shift from foodgrains to new areas

New Delhi: India’s farmers, saddled with huge foodgrain stocks, are shifting from traditional crops to lucrative new areas such as soft wood, fisheries and floriculture, a senior agricultural scientist said. “It is all about market forces now. The farmers are looking for areas with better remuneration, and diversification is taking place,” Mr JS Samra, deputy director general of the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) said.

Analysts said farmers were worried that federal and state governments were doing little to cut stocks of wheat and rice built up after years of successive good monsoon rains. India’s foodgrains stocks stand at 60.8 million tonnes, against a buffer stock requirement of 24.3 million.

Mr Samra said farmers in the major wheat and rice growing states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh had diversified. Many of them had covered vast tracts of land to produce soft wood for the matchstick industry or for use in plywood and boards for the packaging industry.

India currently imports soft wood from countries such as Thailand.
Samra said some leading matchstick companies had also entered into buyback arrangements that ensured a ready market. Inland fishing had also becoming popular with farmers in Punjab.

The Indian government has been encouraging the export of marine products and bringing about improvements in the standards of packaging in the country, particularly for exports. Mr Samra said farmers in the eastern states of Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal, who until now had grown only rice, had also started growing groundnuts and maize. “Soybean cultivation in central Madhya Pradesh...is also a recent phenomenon. They were earlier growing wheat, rice and cotton,” Mr Samra said. Cultivation of castor and mustard, both drought-resistant crops, had increased in the western state of Gujarat while wheat cultivation had decreased. In the apple-growing mountain state of Himachal Pradesh, farmers had started cultivating flowers to cash in on the huge urban and export markets. Floriculture has been identified alongside special schemes to improve packaging and infrastructure. Exports of flowers and seeds rose to Rs 1.73 billion in 1998/99 April/March from $550 in 1994/95. Some 73 per cent of Indian households are in the rural sector and agriculture makes up 30 per cent of GDP.

(Reuters).