Stakeholders in coir are in a tailspin to fix the industry’s backward integration issues, following the clamour for coconut fibre products for an unprecedented range of applications from compact powder to acoustic panels and organic farming. Although the export demand in bulk cargo like coir mattings was as high as 5,37,040 metric tonne per year, the procurement of the main raw material coconut husk had been huge challenge.
“Feedback from the over 160 international trade and technology delegates at the expo Coir Kerala-2015 has made us wiser, in the era of greener thinking, that this was no commodity to stagnate as a cottage industry. We have decided to incentivise the procurement network to collect the R600-crore worth husk available in the state daily, so that we can scale up and optimise the export potential of coir products,” Kerala coir minister Adoor Prakash told FE at Alapuzha.
By the new scheme, the coir cooperative societies, who procure the husk directly or through agents, will get transport costs of R250 for every 5,000 husks and R50 for every additional 1,000 husks.Workers in cooperatives that use de-fibering machines will get, besides their wages, incentives at the rate of R160 for every 400 green husks they procure and R20 for every additional 50 husks. For dry husk, the rate will be R150 for every 600 dry husks and R25 for every extra 100 husks. The government will also subsidise coir fibre at R3 per kg for green husk and R2 for dry husk.
The export demand for coir products was voiced, at the technology and design seminar at the expo in Alapuzha, in a whole gamut of unlikely products from face powder to warm blankets. “The fine powder that is a residual byproduct in the production of coir is as soft as the fine compact powder that is used in cosmetics,” says Ama Agyewaa Agyei , a Ghana-based entrepreneur. She even passed around a sample of this product by her firm Coco Dourado. Agyei says that her company is doing research to see if coir dust can be used to absorb oil, forming cakes, which can then be mechanically removed from the oil spills in oceans.
In European countries, which suffer harsh winter, the new potential use for coir is for warm blankets. Dr Carlo Santulli, who works as material engineering faculty in University of Camerino, Italy, says that hemp fibre used to be utilised in making warm blankets. This art and machinery has died out, but the combination of coir and other plant fibres could probably provide cost-effective alternatives, he says.
Meanwhile, the Institute of Indian Interior Designers had tied up with NCRMI (National Coir Research and Managment Institute) to develop coir panels that can be used on walls and ceiling to create a new kind of indoor acoustic systems. According to designer Collins Samuel , coir has characteristics that allow it to absorb sound and that these characteristics have been enhanced in the Accoir panels. These panels, he says, absorb more than 60% of the sound, resulting in little or no echo. Soundproofing in housing has been a fast-expanding industry in Europe. Gardening products made of coir fibre too had been finding new niches in export markets, favouring organic farming.
The industry has been buoyed, after an eminent commodity marketing expert John Nicholas Hahn had suggested New Zealand-model cross branding for coir products from Kerala, which would take the export of coir products, much beyond the targeted R2,500-crore for 2016-2017. From R807-crore worth exports in 2010-2011, Indian coir had zoomed to R1,476 crore exports in 2014-2015.
At the same time, the growth of coir exports had been mainly on products like coir mattings, coir pith and mattress sheets, which make bulk cargo and inflate transportation costs. However, the new coir products articulated from the demand side, suggested high value, small cargo exports, created cheer in the coir production belts.