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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | How palm oil from Malaysia fired the Patel agitation in Gujarat -M Rajshekhar

How palm oil from Malaysia fired the Patel agitation in Gujarat -M Rajshekhar

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published Published on Oct 4, 2017   modified Modified on Oct 4, 2017
-Scroll.in

It is hard to understand why the Indian government continues to favour palm oil imports over homegrown edible oils in Gujarat and elsewhere.

Dhirubhai is in dire straits. He can no longer recover his investments on the groundnuts he grows on three acres of land along the Junagadh-Verawal road in Gujarat.

In a good year, he grows 100 kilos of groundnuts – or peanuts – for every Rs 4,000 he invests. The minimum support price – or the price at which the government buys the crop – is Rs 4,400. But the middle-aged farmer said government officials buy only from “vyapari aur mota rajkarmi” (traders and big farmers). Smaller farmers like him sell to private oil mills at very low rates. Last year, he got just Rs 3,500 for every 100 kilos of groundnuts – lower than both his investment and the minimum support price.

Groundnuts and Gujarat’s Patidars

In recent years, one of the biggest surprises in Gujarat politics has been the agitation by Patidars, the landowning dominant caste group. Lakhs of Patidars staged protests in 2015, asking for job reservations. Underlying the protests, however, was anger over the dwindling returns from agriculture – in particular, groundnut.

The crop has played an important role in the community’s rise, said sociologist Achyut Yagnik. Originally hailing from north Gujarat, the Patidars travelled southwards to Saurashtra where the princely states engaged them as tenant farmers. After the land reforms in 1956, they became landowners and gradually moved from cultivating millets like bajra to groundnut. The surplus generated by the cash crop, said Yagnik, helped the community expand into agro-industries like dairy farming, oil and flour mills, engineering industries producing equipment for farmers, and other manufacturing businesses like ceramics and pumps.

In other words, groundnut was one of the pillars supporting the Patidars’ emergence as one of the most powerful caste groups in Gujarat.

In recent years, however, this economic scaffolding has weakened. As earlier articles in this series have reported, Gujarat’s small and medium sector is in trouble. As the next story in this series will outline, the state’s milk revolution is in trouble as well. And groundnut, as Dhirubhai illustrates, is nowhere as profitable as before.

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Scroll.in, 4 October, 2017, https://scroll.in/article/852012/how-palm-oil-from-malaysia-fired-the-patel-agitation-in-gujarat


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