Centre to come out with new foodgrains policy soon: minister

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, SEPT. 15. With hardly six months left for WTO regime to come into force, an attempt is being made to fine-tune the foodgrains policy. The new policy, likely to be announced soon, will consider the global and domestic scenarios and the floor price issue.

Disclosing this while inaugurating an international seminar on "Wheat - Farm to Food - First Decade of the New Millennium", which began here today, the Union Minister for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Mr. Shanta Kumar, said the present policy, drafted when the country was facing a food scarcity, was obsolete.

The minister pointed out that the present scenario of surplus foodgrains, coupled with liberalisation and globalisation and the WTO regime to be in place in about six months, called for a fresh look at the policy.

Experts in the field, economists and the industry representatives would be involved in the exercise. Stating that the present policy was full of contradictions, he said that issues such as minimum support price had to be looked into.

While the idea of fixing higher floor prices was aimed at benefiting farmers, this had an adverse impact on consumers. The Government had to spend more than Rs. 300 crores when the floor price for paddy was increased by Rs. 20, he stated.

He admitted that there was inequitable distribution of funds among States. Out of the Rs. 320 crores, a major chunk of Rs. 140 crores was disbursed to Punjab followed by Andhra Pradesh with Rs. 110 crores. The remaining amount was distributed among other States.

He said the Government had finalised a new storage policy. Under this, foodgrains storage would be accorded infrastructure status. It would also provide for private sector participation. Bulk handling and foodgrain transportation would be privatised.

This would supplement the efforts of the Food Corporation of India which was short of storage space resulting in the corporation losing Rs. 4,000 crores annually. FCI godowns were store all the foodgrains and this was causing a lot of wastage, he said.

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Section  : Southern States
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