-Down to Earth Buffer stock of wheat and rice in Food Corporation of India godowns double the normal The Union government has procured and stored record amount of food grain since 2018. Yet, farmers have not been getting a fair price for their crop. And a huge part of the country’s population is unable to access the food grains. Meanwhile, the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has recommended the Union government...
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Tackling India's structural vulnerability in agriculture -Sushma Vasudevan and Aparna Bijapurkar
-The Hindu Business Line A sustainable collectivisation of agri produce and marketing, through Farmer Producer Organisations, will help the highly fragmented agriculture sector realise its full revenue potential. It is widely known that India’s agriculture sector has a challenge of lack of scale. Around 80 per cent of our farmers are small and marginal, with less than two hectares of land. Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) have been posed for years as the...
More »Minimum Support Prices in India: Distilling the Facts -Prankur Gupta, Reetika Khera, and Sudha Narayanan
--Review of Agrarian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, JANUARY-JUNE, 2021 Abstract: In recent years in India, minimum support price (MSP) and government procurement, especially of paddy and wheat, have been discussed widely, but these discussions have often drawn on evidence that is dated and incomplete. Consequently, such discussions have clouded the facts, resulting in a large number of factoids. According to these popular misconceptions, very few farmers (6 per cent only) benefit...
More »It’s time to protect the poor and the migrants from rising edible oil prices
In his Mann ki Baat address to the nation on 30th May, 2021, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi appreciated the fact that the farmers received "more than the minimum support price (MSP) for mustard" pertaining to the rabi production. One can easily guess from this statement of the PM that the mustard growers in Haryana (and elsewhere) preferred to sell their produce to private traders in the open market instead...
More »Odisha’s forest produce gatherers hit hard -Satyasundar Barik
-The Hindu In the pandemic, there aren’t enough buyers and government procurement is delayed For the second year running, forest dwellers across Odisha have been deprived of the right price for the Non-Timber Forest Produce (NTFP) gathered by them. With the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting local economies across the country, the NTFP market in Odisha has also suffered due to the absence of adequate buyers this year. “Last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced, forest...
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