With just over a week for agricultural operations to commence for kharif, there was no word from the State government on the crops that farmers should cultivate to earn profits in the backdrop of a bitter experience last year. When asked, all that Agriculture Minister Pocharam Srinivas Reddy said was “the farmers can go for any crop based on demand and market rates”.
The guarded words of Mr. Reddy were understandable as the government had advised the farmers last year not to cultivate cotton but go for red gram and soya bean in view of likely crash in cotton prices globally. But, the situation reversed for cotton farmers as those who cultivated the crop made profits while those who switched to red gram and soya bean suffered loss.
Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao had himself warned on April 25 last year that the Centre had signed an accord at World Trade Organisation meeting held in Nairobi in December 2015, promising to waive incentives on cotton exports and that the Centre had decided to increase duty on cotton exports. “All this will adversely affect cotton industry in the coming days,” he had said, and added that an action plan to discourage cotton farming in Telangana would be prepared at the Collectors’ conference four days later. The call of Mr. Rao to shift from cotton received a huge response from farmers which a senior agriculture officer described as “amazing and unprecedented”. However, this time, the government had decided not to advocate any crop specifically. Instead, the government was trying to assess pricing patterns of agricultural commodities by handing over a research project to agriculture university in a bid to demistify the complex price matrix. The government’s call for slowdown on cotton resulted in the cropped area coming down from a normal of 17 lakh hectares to 11.5 lakh hectares, the Agriculture Minister said. On the other hand, the area of all pulses went up from 4.04 lakh hectares to 6.39 lakh hectares. The area of red gram alone was up from 2.60 lakh hectares to 4.35 lakh hectares.
On the price front, cotton fetched up to ₹6,500 a quintal in the open market against the MSP of ₹4,160 a quintal.
