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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Tomato price rise: Failed seeds have hurt production, not just extreme heat -Mridula Chari

Tomato price rise: Failed seeds have hurt production, not just extreme heat -Mridula Chari

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published Published on Jun 25, 2016   modified Modified on Jun 25, 2016
-Scroll.in

Farmers in Maharashtra say almost all the seeds supplied by one company contracted a disease.

A failure of tomato seeds might have contributed to the current rise in tomato prices across Maharashtra, if not the rest of the country. Since April, tomato prices have more than doubled across India.

While the conventional wisdom has attributed this to excessive heat and unseasonal rain that affected the tomato crop at its flowering stage, farmers in a belt of 20,000 acres in Western Maharashtra attribute this instead to a disease in the TO-1057 seeds produced by leading agriculture company Syngenta. The total area under tomato cultivation in Maharashtra in 2013-14 was 1.23 lakh acres or 50,000 hectares.

“Almost all the seeds from Syngenta company went bad this year,” said Shriram Gadhave, president of the All India Vegetable Growers’ Association, who works in Narayangaon near Pune and has himself cultivated tomatoes. “Each tomato was green, yellow and red and inside, they were all rotten.”

Around half the seeds in this belt were Syngenta seeds, said Gadhave, and almost all of them failed. This condition did not hurt all tomato cultivators: only those who planted TO-1057 seeds were affected, he said. Gadhave himself had planted tomatoes on one acre of land, with TO-1057 on half and Arka Rakshak seeds on the other half. Only the Arka Rakshak tomatoes yielded any fruit.

Vasant Pimpale, 25, planted Syngenta seeds on six acres of land in his village Pargaon, near Narayangaon, at the beginning of the tomato growing season from December to August. His usual yield per acre is 60 tonnes-70 tonnes, he said. This year, it was not even 10 tonnes. There are two harvests in each season, so after it became clear that the first had failed, he planted the Syngenta seeds on only four acres. This section too has failed.

“Tomato is a cash crop for people here because the rates are so high,” he said. “People have been buying from Syngenta for 30 years which is why they trusted them so much. But with problems in the last two years, we will have to think about this again.”

The problems began only last year, when tomatoes planted for a second time at the end of the season began to manifest the disease. This year, the disease showed up from the beginning of the season itself.

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Scroll.in, 17 June, 2016, http://scroll.in/article/810139/tomato-price-rise-failed-seeds-have-hurt-production-not-just-extreme-heat


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