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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Notebandi takes the sauce out of Nashik's tomatoes -Aniket Aga & Chitrangada Choudhury

Notebandi takes the sauce out of Nashik's tomatoes -Aniket Aga & Chitrangada Choudhury

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published Published on Jan 5, 2017   modified Modified on Jan 5, 2017
-RuralIndiaOnline.org

Farmers in Maharashtra’s Nashik district – where one in every four tomatoes in India comes from – are destroying standing crops on a scale never seen before, following persistent rock-bottom prices since the November 8 demonetisation

On Christmas morning, barely 24 hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation of the Rs. 3,600 crore Shivaji statue in Mumbai, Yashwant and Hirabai Bendkule were slashing and uprooting the tomato vines on their farm in Dhondegaon village of Maharashtra’s Nashik district, just 200 kilometres away. “Since over a month, tomato prices have collapsed. Even leaving the crop standing means a loss for us,” Yashwant muttered, explaining why the Adivasi couple was destroying a perfectly good crop, in which they had invested over Rs. 20,000 and family labour. They will sow wheat in the cleared land. “At least we will  have food to eat in the summer,” Hirabai said.

With the cash crunch following Modi’s November 8 demonetisation announcement, already low tomato prices tanked. The prices at the Girnare  mandi, 20 kilometres from Nashik city, now range from 50 paise to Rs. 2 per kilogram. So low that farmers cannot even recover the cost of harvesting and transporting their produce. Retail prices hover between Rs. 6-10 a kilogram. Across Nashik, a key horticultural district of India, frustrated farmers are uprooting crops, dumping produce, and allowing cattle to graze in vegetable fields, in which they had invested anywhere between Rs. 30,000 and Rs.1.5 lakhs per acre this monsoon.

Good rates last year – ranging from Rs. 300 to Rs. 750 per crate (20 kilos) – saw more farmers sowing tomato with high hopes in monsoon 2016. By October, they realised that with good weather, no major pest attacks, and the number of tomato growers increasing, there would be an abundant harvest. So, rates might be favourable, but would not match those of the previous year. Several farmers said rates were decent over Dussehra and just break-even until Diwali, at about Rs. 130 per crate.

However, with the outlawing of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, harvest arrivals met a severe paucity of currency, driving down purchases and prices. “Rates fell by November 11, and have never recovered,” said Nitin Gaikar a Girnare-based farmer. They’ve fallen to a range of Rs. 10-40 a crate since then. Gaikar points out that cash fuels the entire rural agricultural economy, including transactions among farmers, traders, transporters, retailers of farm inputs and labourers.

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RuralIndiaOnline.org, 4 January, 2017, https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/notebandi-takes-the-sauce-out-of-nashiks-tomatoes/


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