-TheWire.in In a green paper, organisations have pointed out how a number of promises made to farmers have not been kept. New Delhi: Terming the Narendra Modi government as the “most anti-farmer government in the history of independent India” for reneging on its “core” promise of revising minimum support prices (MSP), a ‘green paper’ on agriculture says the Bharatiya Janata Party’s pledge to “double farm incomes by 2022” remains a distant dream. “The...
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What to expect in 2018 from the farm sector: prices could hold key to several political fortunes -Harish Damodaran & Parthasarathi Biswas
-The Indian Express Agricultural prices crashed in April-June, just when a bumper rabi crop had been harvested after two years of drought, and despite demonetisation. 2017 was agriculture’s annus horribilis. The reason wasn’t monsoon failure (as in 2014 and 2015) or unseasonal rain and hail (as in March 2015); the year was, in fact, largely free of extreme weather events, resulting in a record output of wheat, pulses, cotton, potato and a...
More »In parched Bundelkhand, a new burden for farmers: Build fences to keep cattle out -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express Gauraksha is fine, but who will protect our crop from stray cattle, ask farmers. Jhanshi: With Rs 1.5 lakh, a farmer can buy three Holstein Friesian crossbred cows, each giving 4,000 litres or more of milk annually. But Rs 1.5 lakh is roughly what Bhupendra Patel has spent on fencing his 10-acre farm at Dhawari village in Jhansi district’s Tahrauli tehsil. The seven-feet-high barbed-wire enclosure is only to prevent...
More »Wheat sowing lower by 6% from last year, shows agriculture ministry's data -Sayantan Bera
-Livemint.com Wheat sowing is lagging behind last year’s numbers despite a hike in support prices and doubling of import duties to encourage domestic growers New Delhi: Area planted under wheat, the main winter crop, is 6% lower than the year before, showed data on progress of Rabi sowing released by the agriculture ministry on Friday. According to the ministry, wheat has so far been planted in 19 million hectares, compared to the 20.4...
More »A way to manage falling prices of pulses -C Rangarajan & Shashanka Bhide
-The Hindu Business Line Procurement of the excess output vis-a-vis a normal year, rather than open-ended purchase, is a viable option A bountiful harvest that implies an increase in output may not always increase the nominal income of the farming sector, which is subject to the behaviour of input and more particularly output prices, which may sometimes move sharply. There can, therefore, be years in which there is a sudden and sharp...
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