Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Tuesday, Nov 23, 2004
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Tuesday, Nov 23, 2004 |
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Agri-Biz & Commodities
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Contract Farming TN agriculture dept into cotton contract farming G. Gurumurthy
Coimbatore , Nov. 22 CLOSE on the heels of a few corporate experiments on cotton contract farming done in the last two years in the State, it now appears to be the turn of the Tamil Nadu Agriculture Department to venture into organising cotton developmentunder what it calls the `contact farming'. Naming it as a `tripartite public-private partnership', the State Agricultural Commissionerate, which has proposed a contractual cotton cultivation programme, unveiled its commercial model of farming at a stakeholders' meet held under the banner of the State Agriculture Department in the city on Sunday. The commissionerate will be the chief coordinator for contract farming. The meet was attended by members of ginners, textile mills, officials from Cotton Corporation of India, State agri-department and farm scientists. The commissionerate has set an informal target of raising cotton on 20,000 hectares under contract farming and the cultivation terrain chosen by it would be irrigated tracts of coastal and river basin districts. But, it may start off with 4000-5000 ha in the next two months. According to Mr Jagmohan Singh Raju, Commissioner of Agriculture, the districts identified are Thanjavur, Nagapattinam, Tiruvaru (coastal), Tirunelveli, Salem, Erode and Namakkal (all river-fed irrigation tracts). The farming focus will be on cluster-villages in these districts and the contract farming facilitation will be through supply of credit-linked quality inputs to the farmers enrolled under the project which will be organised through the agricultural extension centers, he said. The model to be followed will involve banking and insurance companies for credit input and loss guarantee and the choice of the cotton and their quality parameters would be decided in consultation with the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) and the textile mills in the State (for which it would rope in the Southern India Mills Association). The farming model would also receive incentive support from various State and Central Government schemes. Mr Rajusaid the mismatch in the demand and supply gap for cottonwas intriguing as the mills in the State that needed 60 lakh bales of cotton for their consumption, sourced bulk of it from far-away States. This phenomenon had made the commissionerate mull on the tripartite model of farming to benefit the mills and cotton farmers. The contract model farming has sought to involve textile mills that will agree to buy the entire cotton produced and alternatively, the Cotton Corporation of India and NAFED. A trustworthy pricing mechanism for the cotton sold by the farmers would be evolved through consultation and the varieties of cotton to be sowed will be MCU-5, Surabhi, LRA.5166, MCU-7 and SVPR-2.
More Stories on : Contract Farming | Cotton | Tamil Nadu
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