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Viable scheme sought for copra procurement

G.K. Nair

KOCHI, April 22

THE Cochin Oil Merchants Association (COMA) has urged the State Government to consider whether the procurement operations under the support price scheme should be continued or replaced with an appropriate and viable scheme.

The State Government was dumping crores of rupees into the drain on the pretext of safeguarding the interests of the farmers. But, with these investments even the low support price announced by the Centre could be realised by the coconut farmers, Mr. Ram Bahadur Singh and Mr. N Ananthan, President and Secretary respectively of COMA, said in a release here on Saturday.

The market intervention agencies (MIA) for price support had no effective organisation to procure the arrivals in the terminal markets. The objective here should be to prevent prices from falling and to sell at the best available price lest the farmers w ould be deprived of a remunerative price. Therefore, they urged the Government to come out with a better and workable alternative before the situation worsened.

According to them, ``political compulsions dictate that the MIA should procure more quantities at higher support price, where the losses incurred by these agencies are at a geometrical progression and the benefit to farmers is meagre''. The present suppo rt price operation was neither benefitting the farmer nor the MIA, they claimed. ``The irony is that the State Government and the Coconut Development Board demanded a Minimum Support Price (MSP) of Rs. 4,100 per quintal for copra at a time when the price of coconut oil rules at Rs. 3,700 per quintal''. If the market could not bear the support price, then there was no point of fixing higher support price, they said.

What was needed now, they said, was to procure the required level of quantity for preventing a sharp decline in open market price below the support price, so that the maximum benefit could be derived out of the procurement operation. Therefore, every eff ort should be made to procure copra only from the farmers and not from the intermediaries who were reaping the benefit, they added.

They said the exploitation of farmers had come from those who were supposed to be the saviour of farmers. ``Lack of credibility and trustworthiness of the societies to which the procurement operations has been entrusted also added to the problems. The re fusal of societies to procure the copra brought by the farmers forced them to turn to the traders who in turn sold the same to the societies and made huge profit,'' they alleged.

The present state of the farmers could be attributed to the lack of commitment and social accountability evident at all levels of the procurement operations. ``Nothing very effective can be done if the very fence starts grazing the crop,'' they said.

The MSP for 1999 was at Rs. 3,100 per quintal. This year the Government had not yet announced the MSP. The State Government announced in early March that the MIA would procure copra from farmers at last year's support price of Rs. 3,100 per quintal. Even after the announcement, the open market price remained between Rs. 2,600 and Rs. 2,700. Last year during the period the prices of copra stood at Rs. 3,800 a quintal, while that of coconut oil at Rs. 5,700. Kerala produced about 4.5 lakh tonnes of copra every year out of the estimated seven lakh tonnes produced in the country.