Coffee plantations should be tech driven: Jairam
India’s coffee-plantation sector should be technology-driven and not subsidy-driven, Union minister of state for commerce Jairam Ramesh said here on Tuesday.
By TNN |
BANGALORE: India’s coffee-plantation sector should be technology-driven and not subsidy-driven, Union minister of state for commerce Jairam Ramesh said here on Tuesday. The commerce ministry and Coffee Board were working in this direction, he said, while addressing the 49th annual conference of Karnataka Planters Association (KPA).
Apart from the release this December after field trials of the first coffee plant variety to be developed in 21 years, a Centre for Biotechnology had been set up in Mysore to sequence the coffee genome.
The objective, he said, was to ensure that India’s coffee plants could withstand the kind of stress of prolonged dry spells of up to 180 days, unlike in the world’s leading coffee- growing nation of Brazil where it rained every month. To fulfil this objective, the Coffee Board had been networking with scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore and at the M S Swaminathan Foundation in Chennai.
The Coffee Board was, he said, also working on an objective of making coffee less Karnataka-centric —the state grew over 70% of India’s coffee. The Coffee Board was planning to expand cultivation to non-traditional areas. While coffee was being cultivated for the last few years in the north-east, it was now proposed to set up a curing centre in Mizoram and start cultivation in Nagaland.
He noted that in the Naxalite-infested belt of Paderu in Andhra Pradesh, some 60,000 tribal growers were cultivating 4,000 tonnes of organic coffee a year. Discussions had been held with companies like ITC to help with marketing. It was proposed to increase the number of growers to 120,000 in the next five years and double the tonnage of production. This experiment would also be initiated in Orissa’s tribal belt of Koraput.
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Vis-a-vis the social costs which, as of now, was being borne by the planters under the Plantation Labour Act, Mr Ramesh said he had held discussions with the Panchayati Raj minister Mani Shankar Aiyar on how the expenditure on creating or improving the social infrastructure like housing, schools, hospitals could be equitably shared. Stressing the need to boost domestic consumption, Mr Ramesh said he wanted the present mix of 80% exports and 20% domestic to be changed to 70:30 or 60:40. The Coffee Board had, he said, formulated an objective of doubling domestic consumption from the present level of 80,000 tonnes by increasing the annual offtake to the tune of 5,000 to 6,000 tonnes a year.
The Eleventh Plan outlay on coffee had, he said, been increased to Rs 750 crore from the Tenth Plan allocation of Rs 300 crore. A significant portion of this would, he said, go towards replantation. It was proposed to replant 70,000 to 80,000 hectares over the next seven to 10 years.
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