Horticulture farmers in Anantapur district, especially those cultivating mango, sapota and banana, are a worried lot with the government implementing the ban on use of carbide in ripening of the fruits in spite of a clear absence of alternatives.
Sapota, which used to be one of the largest grown fruits in the district, is dwindling in acreage over the last several years owing to lack of marketing facilities. Coupled with the ban on carbide, the acreage has reduced to around 2,500 hectares from almost double that of the current acreage a few years ago.
“Sapota farmers, in the last year alone, have lost over Rs. 100 per packet (a packet equals 30 kg) as traders decided to cite lack of alternatives to carbide, and reduced the price staging that there was a risk of not able to market the fruit within the right time”, said B. Ravindranath Reddy of Chukkaluru village of Tadipatri mandal, who besides being a farmer also aggregates the fruit for traders in Hyderabad.
There is a lone ripening centre in the district headquarters with a capacity to ripen 20 MT every day, which would more or less cater to the demand of Anantapur town and its outskirts, while all other fruit leaves the district invariably unripe.
While the government, on its part, is sensitising farmers and the common public to not use or buy carbide-ripened fruits, it does not seem to be doing anything to inform farmers of either the existing ripening chambers available at Tadipatri and Anantapur, although both are private owned, which use ethylene gas to ripen the fruits.
While the district is set to produce about 1.3 lakh tonnes of mango in the coming months, it lacks the infrastructure to ripen anything more than 2,000 MT.
