APMCs vote for new members, but farmers want change in attitude

January 12, 2017 02:35 pm | Updated 06:54 pm IST - Bidar:

Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs) of the district voted to elect new members on Thursday. The results will be announced on Saturday.

Though the APMC elections are supposed to be non-political, they follow the pattern of gram panchayat polls, where leaders of various parties back local candidates. Each term is five years long and there will be a mixture of leaders from the hobli, taluk and district levels.

But farmers’ leaders believe that the members have not been of much help. “Members come and go, but our problems remain,” said Vishwanath Patil Koutha, a Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha leader. “The APMCs were set up to ensure remunerative prices for farmers and end their exploitation by middlemen. But none of them [committees] have succeeded in this.”

He said that first of all, the members don’t come to the market in time to stop the fall in prices in times of glut. The delay helps traders form a coterie and hoodwink farmers. For example, red gram prices have been falling since October, but the local APMCs did not start procurement till the last week of December, he said.

Secondly, the State government had issued strict circulars to traders to use electronic scales, instead of mechanical weighing machines. But no APMC in the district has been able to enforce this properly, he said.

Basavaraj Biradar, another farmers’ leader, said, “The government’s ambitious plan to link all APMCs to electronic markets has not yet taken off. Farmers in Maharashtra, for example, are getting good prices on online markets. We should follow them soon.”

Veerabhushan Nandagave, who grows horticulture crops, said the State government should also expand the scope of APMC to encompass all kinds of crops, including including fruits, flowers, vegetables, spices and plantation crops. Cash crops such as sugarcane are currently not included under the purview of APMC. The whole of Hyderabad-Karnataka region does not have horticulture produce marketing committees, and this needs to be addressed, he said.

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