Upar ki kamayi, is one of the attractions of a government job those who believe public service is a privilege that must reflect . them salary is saving and the is spending. It is a flippant analogy that applies to coconut gardens as well, where the side crops grown between palms can far exceed that nuts if farmers being agriculturally monogamous and opt coconut based farming systems.
Ironically, in a country where cooking oil is the number one food import item with a tab of . in , the supply of coconut oil exceeds demand, keeping s down because the market is flush with competing and er palm oil. Between and , worldwide production of cooking oil rose percent that of palm oil increasing the most at percent, followed by soyabean oil and rapeseed oil. But the output of coconut oil declined by a little over one percent.
Coconut farming. ty Im sCoconut farming. ty Im s
Import duties were raised to . percent and percent crude and refined palm oil respectively last December . percent and percent earlier as global s of edible oil have fallen. But they have had a damping effect on coconut oil. In , copra which coconut oil is extracted s were below the floor fixed by the government, as procurement by Nafed did little to move market s. The ncy lacks stor facilities, and procurement is limited to just days.
If this trend continues, we are worried about the future , says P Chowdappa, director of the Central Plantation Crops Research Institute in Kerala s coastal district of Kasargod, across the Karnataka border. The institute, founded in , was taken over by the government in , when trade financed commodity boards were abolished. The research centres it had spawned spices, ew, oil palm and coastal agriculture have been hived off into independent institutes and directorates CPCRI focuses on research in coconut, arecanut and cocoa.
Though India share of the world s coconut acre is percent, it produces percent of the world s nuts because productivity per hectare is two and a half times more than the next big producers Indonesia and the Philippines. To secure the future of coconut growers, most of them small holders in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, who produced percent of the country s output of . nuts in , it is vital that coconut finds ded value es.
Cold pressed extra coconut oil is one spin off plugged at the beauty and health conscious its high lauric acid content next to mother s milk , says Chowdappa which sells double the of the plain vanilla variety.
Neera, or the sap of the inflorescence, is another booster. Being rich in vitamins, anti oxidants and blood pressure lowering potassium, it is peddled as a nutritious drink. Chowdappa says it has more sugar than cane and must be kept refrigerated so it does not ferment into toddy, an alcoholic drink. It took some persuasion the Kerala government to revise it excise policy in and allow of neera as a non alcoholic in the state. More work will have to go into neera processing to extend its shelf life, so it can be bottled and mass marketed.
Growers who wish to the rigmarole, plant dwarfs tender nuts which are increasingly sought after as natural thirst quenchers. CPCRI has developed three varieties of them ing the dwarfing gene of a variety found in Hirehalli of Karnataka s Tumkur district in the s. State agriculture universities have ded to the list with their own versions. Coconut palms are generally towering, rising up to t and go by names like west coast, east coast, Tiptur, Gangabondam and Benaulim with the suffix tall ded to them.
Dwarf varieties are forced upon growers as there is a th of climbers. Sheer physical effort and the fear factor discour people taking up the vocation. Farmers individually are at the mercy of climbers. A of a farmer producer company FPC in Coimbatore said they were spared the indignity of having to plead with climbers after banding together. Climbers would charge paise per nut but after the FPC assured them regular work, they have brought down the rate to paise.
Mechanical climbing aids have not been very ful the most popular is the one developed by a Kerala farmer ed Chamberi Joseph and is named after him. Fully mechanical ones will be a great help not plucking but also spraying.
Since palms are planted in grids of . metres by metres per hectare there is ample room other crops like pepper, betel, areca nut, banana and pineapple, the mix varying with regions. While a coconut farms yield about Rs , a hectare, with multiple crops the can be times as much. The farms, of course, will need irrigation and close supervision.
Among the promising inter crops is cocoa. At , tonnes, India has just . percent of the world s share. It is grown mainly in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. India s per capita annual consumption of cocoa is gm, but growing. Demand cocoa exceeds supply. s are volatile as they are yoked to the international market. Farmers came to grief in the last decade when s slumped.
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Cocoa was selling six a kg, so we uprooted it, says K Kanakraj, , of vill Semmedu in Coimbatore district. it is selling Rs a kg of bean.
Cadbury India Mondolez India and Campco, a Mangaluru based cooperative, are the main ers of cocoa. Demand exceeds supply. CPCRI has recommended contract farming under tripartite agreements with the government being a party, so that farmers are not ft in the lurch should global s fall.
India can become a global ader in cocoa production without ditional in land, says Chowdappa. India s productivity is higher than the international aver . Our quality is on a par with that of Ghana, he says.
This could well happen. Bananas are an example. If the district of Jalgaon in Maharashtra were a state, it would rank fifth in India in banana production. All because of a company ed Jain Irrigation which introduced a variety ed Grande Naine in the s, supplied tissue cultured saplings and trained farmers in drip irrigation and fertigation.
The integration of private corporate ers and research institutes with farmers can bring about a similar change in cocoa cultivation as well. That upar ki kamayi will be the fruit of enterprise worth aspiring for. |
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