Opinion: fast-growing Indian horticulture adds value, alleviates poverty
By Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) fruits and horticultural technology division head Anand Kumar Singh
Indian Agriculture has witnessed a remarkable growth in terms of food grain production, increasing from 52 million metric tons (MT) in 1950 to 263 million MT in 2013-14. In addition to that, for the first time in Indian history, horticulture production has surpassed food grain production at 268 million MT.
These trends have played significantly in reducing the poverty in India. It's worth mentioning that about 68% of the population of India reside in villages and are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.
Stagnating crop yields, depleting and degrading natural resources, unemployment, malnutrition and climate change are emerging as something like threats to our production system. This is happening at a time when rising income, increasing urbanization and unfolding globalization is bringing a paradigm shift in the Indian diet (food) basket. Cereal consumption is showing a decline and y demand for high value agriculture such as horticulture, meat, eggs poultry is rising.
Therefore horticulture crops like fruits and vegetable are gaining importance at a policy level.
The new government of India is taking prudent steps to make agriculture, particularly horticulture, a profitable enterprise which must work as a business model and is sustainable.
The internal rate of return on investment in horticulture is high, and therefore there is a greater focus on crops such as fruits, vegetables, ornamentals, and plantation crops. The new government under Narendra Modi, we believe, is poised for rapid improvements in developing and strengthening infrastructure (roads, electricity, capacity building,skill enhancement, cold storage, etcetera) to minimize post-harvest losses and increase the farmer's profit.
These changes will drastically improve the whole supply chain management, from quality guarantees to value addition to greater price realization to stakeholders.
In addition to this, Modi wants a speedy transfer of technologies to minimize the cost of production without any compromise on quality, keeping in mind environmental and food safety with nutritional security.
About 5-18% of the nation's agricultural production goes to waste each year because of insufficient storage capacity and difficulties in access to markets. India's cold chain storage infrastructure lags behind world standards: its cold storage capacity is only 0.09 cubic metres per person, compared with 0.30 in Brazil and 0.27 in Japan.
The Government is charting out a plan to bring down such losses to a minimum level. The 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17) aims for the creation of 30 mega–food-processing parks; only two are currently operating. Eleven others have been granted approval and are in the process of acquiring land or being constructed. If these food parks are fully functional then it may create one million additional jobs for the rural people.
In a few days from now the government presented the yearly budget. Modi spoke about innovation leading horticultural growth for the country. The planning commission of India has set the growth target for agriculture during the next five year plan (20012-17) at 4%. Horticulture’s share of agricultural GDP is over 30%.
Therefore, to attain an overall agricultural growth of 4%, Indian horticulture needs to grow at 8%. This may not present any challenge as the horticultural sector of the country has grown at 7.5% for the last 8 years. Horticulture occupies only 12 % of the arable land (142 million hectare) but holds great promise for the immediate future.