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Our Bureau

Hyderabad , Sept. 30

THE Association of Food Scientists and Technologists (India) is organising a day-long national workshop on "Value addition to foods - Fruits and vegetables" here on October 1.

"We do just seven per cent value addition to food produce as against 45 per cent in the Philippines and 23 per cent in China. We need to focus on value addition to be competitive in the global markets and to utilise our strengths better," Mr P. Ramakrishna of the AFST (I) said.

Addressing a press conference on Thursday, he put the fruits and vegetable market size at Rs 1,13,000 crore. "Thirty per cent of this goes waste in the absence of proper storage facilities and value addition," he said.

"Despite achieving significant surpluses in agricultural produce, our levels of processing have remained low," he pointed out.

"With an arable land of 184 million hectares, India produces 210 million tonnes of food grains, 150 million tonnes of fruits and vegetables and 91 million tonnes of milk and 820 million kg of tea," he said, ranking very high in global rankings.

The total market size of food processing sector was estimated to be at Rs 4,60,000 crore in 2003-04.

The Hyderabad meet is the second in the series of five workshops planned in association with Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI - Mysore) and Defence Food Research Laboratory (Mysore).

The first workshop, which was held in New Delhi on September 17, focussed on `Frontier technologies in packaging'.

The workshops would be held in Mumbai on October 22 on the theme `Value addition in cereals', in Kolkata on November 5 (on tea) and in Bangalore on December 9 and 10 (Process engineering and product innovation).

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