For Ahamed Kochu (Kochuppa) farming was a way of life, uncomplicated, serene. Like most of the small and medium farmers his only marketing reach for his spices was the local agent. He held on to plantation and passion till he died. Keeping the legacy of farming alive was not easy.
Life in the plantations of Idukki, for the next generation, was like being confined in the high up of nowhere. The family of Ahamed Kochu decided to partition and sell off the property. That’s when young techie Asif Ali stepped in!
Ahamed’s grandson, Asif completed his engineering from Muvattupuzha, joined Petrolink International, a company that provides integrated information and communications technology solutions to oil and gas operators around the world and for nearly seven years worked in West Asia, UK and the US. “I had joined the office at Infopark, Kochi, when the family had to make this crucial decision. I never had a green thumb but the thought of selling off the land that the family had held for generations really bothered me. We put our heads down in search for a solution. And that’s how Farmers Cargo Exporters was born. It was an organised extension of what my grandfather used to do, reaching out to hundreds of spice farmers, helping them lead a better life,” says Asif.
Idukki, especially the Rajakumari area, has one of the world’s largest stockpiles of black gold, as pepper is known. It fetches top prices in the world market but the small and medium farmers scrape a living on the margins of this ‘gold’ market. Most of these farmers may know the current prices, the direction of the futures market, the benefits of holding stocks but do not have post-harvest facilities like storage facilities, dryers, to hold on to the produce forcing him to sell it off at the agent’s price.
“The spice farmers, the small and medium ones, in our State have no access to international markets. They sell their precious produce to middlemen for a pittance. Farmers Cargo intends to break this. These farmers grow cash rich crops like cardamom, black pepper, cashew, turmeric, ginger and cloves. But they hardly get reasonable returns because their output is small. What we have been doing for the past year and more is pooling these small quantities into large tradable volumes and marketing them directly to countries like Germany and Belgium. We pay the market price to the farmer and also 60 per cent of the profit after the produce is sold to the foreign buyers. We retain 25 per cent, which is used to run Farmers Cargo.”
At present around 90 farmers, in and around Idukki, are members of Farmers Cargo. “We have enquiries from the neighbouring districts of Tamil Nadu. It is just more than a year since we launched our operations so we thought to wait a bit before venturing into these farms. This is not simply another business. We realise that the core is all about ‘sharing’ and not ‘trading’ in spices. Agriculture is the livelihood of these farmers and what they grow are not ‘commodities’ to be bought and sold by middlemen for profits. We are not middlemen who ‘buy’ but rather we ‘share’ the profits with them.”
