Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, drawing his attention to the huge fall in the prices of maize and moong in the state. Siddaramaiah said that this decline has created deep concern among the farmers. Siddaramaiah said in a letter written on Friday that in this Kharif season, maize was grown in 17.94 lakh hectares and moong in 4.16 lakh hectares in Karnataka.
Farmers expected the maize yield to be 54.74 lakh tonnes and the moong yield to be 1.983 lakh tonnes. But due to falling prices, farmers are in trouble. Siddaramaiah wrote, prices have fallen far below the Minimum Support Price (MSP) declared by the Government of India, causing widespread concern and distress among farmers.
He said the central government has fixed the minimum support price (MSP) for maize at Rs 2,400 per tonne and for moong at Rs 28,768 per tonne. But the current prices of maize in Karnataka have fallen to Rs 1,600 to Rs 1,800 per tonne and the price of moong to around Rs 5,400 per tonne. He said that the average prices of the last three years have also been higher than the MSP, but due to external pressure and demand-supply imbalance, prices have now fallen to record lows.
According to the Chief Minister, there is an excess production of 32 lakh tonnes of maize in Karnataka, which is much more than the capacity of local industries. Siddaramaiah urged Prime Minister Modi to direct the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED), Food Corporation of India (FCI) and National Cooperative Consumer Federation Limited (NCCF) to immediately start procurement as per MSP under the Price Support Scheme or any other appropriate arrangement.
Union Minister Pralhad Joshi, in a post on social media platform
Joshi said that these ethanol production units, which were licensed by the state government, should have been directed to enter into formal agreements for guaranteed purchase with NCCF/NAFED, which has not happened so far. He said that the standard operating procedure for this was distributed among the concerned stakeholders.
Before pointing fingers, the Congress government in Karnataka should answer why the state government did not make it mandatory for ethanol production units to purchase maize from farmers at the minimum support price, he asked.
The Union Minister said that the State Government has the authority to enforce local procurement rules, and if ethanol production units are purchasing maize at a price lower than the MSP, it is because the State Government has not given appropriate instructions to these units to purchase at the MSP.
