Role of Horticulture in India’s drylands or rainfed agriculture:
In 2018 total area under horticulture in India reached 25.7 Mil. ha or 18%of the total cultivable area and the contribution of horticulture in Agriculture GDP reached 33%.
It is significant achievement yet one must compare this with past. In 2013, area under horticulture was 8.4% and contribution to agri GDP was 30.4%. What’s not happening to raise the growth rate of contribution to GDP?
The answer maybe in my experience in a recent experiment.
My last 1.5 years were spent organising farmers of Uttar Kannada district towards a farmer’s producers company. This district has big horticulture produce in terms of banana, mango, jackfruit, pineapple, kokum, ginger and a lot of Non timber forest produce. The first few experiments succeeded in evolving beautiful dehydrated fruits with two women self help groups in Siddapur taluka. Thus, the larger collective of farmers decided to go further with large scale dehydrated fruits enterprise. It’s a process that may take at least a few months. We began preparing for the same.
In May 2022, the farmers decided that till the time dehydration unit is mobilised, let’s aggregate and sell mango in nearest APMC of Hubli. Alphonso mango of North Karnataka arrives 20-30 days later than Alphonso mango of Maharashtra and Konkan. So the price that initial supplies of Maharashtra mango commands is not available for the mango of Karnataka. couple this with poor planning of demand based supplies, lack of experience in handling pack house facilities, no processing backup in case of poor demand; the farmers lost Rs.9.3 lakhs in a fortnight. Ofcourse, a local philanthropic organisation helped them to come out of any kind of loan or debt obligations as a one time bailout.. How many Farmers organisations will have this kind of support in our country?
My learning is simple:
- Promoting horticulture without a proper supply value chain initiative is detrimental to actual realisation of wealth by farmers
- Marketing of value added horticulture needs 100x more initiatives than what’s there on the ground
- Even aggregation and marketing of perishable produce in the current scenario is very challenging because of lack of professional assistance to farmers
A few billions worth of horticulture is getting wasted at farm gates. So adding supply value chain to existing horticulture pockets is immediately needed to prove and build confidence in farming community that Horticulture is a good way of raising incomes.
Again critical investment by governments are needed with private industry and protecting the interest of farmers. Quality of good internationally accepted value added produce is the Game Changer.
India has the might of technology, infrastructure, capital, branding, ensuring quality and making the world accept it’s products. What is needed is the organisation of educated, visionary farmers and an integration “Bharat India Jodo”