'Indian agro based products of inferior quality'

Ludhiana, July 16: Though the government was making constant efforts to expand the agro processing base in the country, but inferior quality agro products avaliable for the agro units are prooving to be a major hinderance in this endeavour.

For instance, Indian bread-wheat contains less than 11 per cent protein and the wheat crop is often infested with the Karnal-bunt disease problem. This makes Indian made wheat products unacceptable in the global market and prevents expansion of the agro industry based on wheat.

Likewise Indian maize is lower in proteins (tryptophan and lysine) and potatoes have more than 0.2 per cent sugar which is against world standards.

"Available agro-based raw materials have also to be improved so that they contain desirable traits for processing", Dr M S Bajwa, Member of the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU Board of Management and former Director of Research stated here today.

The resultant low quality products of our existing agro-industrial units involved in packaged-flour production, bakery, oil-extraction; soybean processing, milk-products, sugar production, processing of fruits and vegetables and others, fail to compete in the quality-conscious global market, he added. To compete at global level, adoption of strict quality control and sanitary and phyto-sanitary measures and certification is paramount, he added.

Further more, some of the existing agro based units are becoming unprofitable because of their inappropriate locations and poor management. This calls for restructuring of the entire agro-production, processing and market systems, Dr Bajwa stressed.

Citing the main bottlenecks in rural agro-industrialization, Dr Bajwa said some of these are low public and private investment, inadequate participation of NGOs, poor market support, environmental pollution problems, shortage of skilled workers, unreliable power supply, poor modes of transportation and communication and insufficient rural-infrastructure.

A paradigm shift is needed for Punjab agriculture to move beyond agro-production based economy to that of "agro-production, value-addition and processing industry-driven" rural-economy.

Building up of modern agro-processing industrial base in rural areas and modernising the existing units through increased public-private partnership and investment is vital, he added.

According to Dr Bajwa, conventional systems of farming and allied-activities cannot sustain the economy of growing rural population.Over the years, share of agriculture in State-GDP has declined, he added. The rural-employment growth rate in the country is declining (2.4% in 1983-94 to less than 0.7% in 1994-2003) and urban-rural economic gaps are increasing, he opined. He emphasised that these downtrends must be reversed to regenerate rural-economy and also to realize full potential of the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) Act.

Commenting on Punjab's rural-economy, Dr Bajwa said it is constrained by the high-cost input-intensive production and export of non-processed agricultural produce (mainly food-grains) at much lower prices than is possible through the trade of processed and value-added products. The currently recommended farm-diversification plans are also failing to control declining profitability because these do not have adequate support of competitive agro-industry and remunerative market, he lamented.

He pointed that the Vision Document of the Union Ministry of Food Processing Industries had set the target for food processing industry to grow from Rs 4,60,000 crore at present to Rs 13,50,000 crore, by 2015. Punjab should also exploit agro-export opportunities that are increasing with the reduction in import duties, removal of non-tariff barriers and reduction in subsidies to domestic agriculture, he suggested.

Moreover, the promotion of world-class infrastructure and favourable public policies under the Special Economic and Agri-export Zones will immensely help in ensuring export-oriented agro-commercialisation of Punjab, he said.

Dr Bajwa called for focusing on decreasing rural-urban economic gaps by creating farming-systems which are region-based and commodity-specific agro-industrial complexes in rural areas, having a network of public or private funded small and medium sized enterprise clusters. One regional parent-unit can take the responsibility of arranging quality raw-materials (may be through contract farming), product handling, quality control and marketing of the products, processed at different village level small-units.

Decision about the kind of most suitable agro-industry, its potential and location in the region should be on the basis of socio economic analysis of "production-processing-marketing-consumption relationships", he added. We must review some of the faulty rules about subsidies on agro-industry and withdraw unnecessary licenses for installing small-scale agro-enterprises in rural areas, he added.

UNI