Taking a cue from their counterparts in Karnataka, where tobacco growers got a better average price of about ₹135 per kg, the growers in Prakasam district on Tuesday pressed for a high price of ₹160 to ₹170 per kg of bright grade variety.
Ahead of the e-auctions, which are set to commence from March 15 in the traditional growing areas, farmers, at a meeting convened at the Tobacco Board regional office here, threatened to “stall the auctions if they are meted out a raw deal as in the previous years.”
“We will have no option but to withdraw tobacco bales from the auction platforms if we are offered a price below ₹160 per kg for F1 and F2 grades and below ₹150 per kg for F3 grade when e-auctions commence later this month,” farmers from the Southern Light Soil (SLS) and Southern Black Soil (SBS) regions made it clear.
Hostile conditions
They wanted the Tobacco Board to take into consideration the hostile conditions under which they raised the crops, including prolonged dry spell and widespread parasitic weed, Orabanche cernua, infestation.
The market regulator should ensure that they got a better price of ₹120 per kg for low grade tobacco from cigarette manufacturers and exporters, they pleaded.
In any case, the average price should not come down below ₹135 per kg for them to scrape through this year after two successive years of heavy losses, said V.V. Prasad, Farmers’ Association president in Ongole II auction platform. Tobacco production is expected to be about 50 million kg, as against the crop size of over 80 million kg fixed for the SLS and SBS regions put together, according to Indian Tobacco Association sources.
The SLS farmers got an average price of ₹109 per kg for 39 million kg marketed last year and their counterparts in the SBS region marketed about 41 million kg and realised an average price of about ₹107 per kg.
E-auctions were lacklustre last year after the cigarette manufacturers decided to stop production in protest against the stipulation of larger pictorial health warning.
The sector, for the first time since declaration of crop holiday in 2000, had witnessed distress in the previous year, triggering suicide by 15 growers and forcing Union Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to offer a bonus price for low grade tobacco.
