Food processing and agri-business areas were most neglected in the country although agriculture sector has made some tangible progress, Agriculture Production Commissioner of Telangana C. Parthasarathi has stated.
Speaking at the ‘Agripace-2017’ Agricultural Conference and Expo here on Monday, he said post-harvesting processing of crops was to be focused for improving the income of farmers and also to help the unemployed youth get employment. He stated that the youth were not taking to agriculture anymore and those already in it were leaving it as the profession was getting non-remunerative.
He suggested the youth to take up post-harvesting processes of the farm produce to make value addition to all agricultural and horticultural produce since there was tremendous potential to make it big.
Several others including Benny Dembitzer of Grassroots Africa (UK), Prof. Ilan Chet of Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), M. Vijay Gupta of WorldFish (Malaysia), Director of ICRISAT, Suhas P. Wani, Dr. Shahaji Sambhaji Phand of MANAGE, Prof. J Devi Prasad of Agripace and others also spoke.
