Neither its Spain nor it is the last Wednesday of August at Buñol to enjoy throwing tomatoes at one another in a local festival called la Tomatina. Still, every single vegetable marketplace here in State is laden with bags of tomato going to be sold at almost absolutely free. Even customers many a times are feeling uncomfortable to buy it at Rs 3 per Kg the moment they think about what farmers could actually be earning at that price.
However, tomato is available at Rs one per Kg and even below this for bulk purchasers in most parts of the State. And it is available in as much quantity as anyone could be willing to carry. Ironically, tomato growers find it better to leave it in fields and see it perishing than to collect it and sell at a price which might be insufficient even to compensate cost of plucking, collecting and bringing to market place, let alone the cost of growing.
Be it Bero or Nagri in Ranchi, Tamar in Jamshedpur or Narauli and Kairo in lohardaga, farmers across the State are simply bleeding at probably lowest wholesale price ever. The same is the situation in other districts of the State. However, in place of finding any immediate solution to this, horticulture department officials blamed farmers of growing tomato in unnecessarily in extended area of land.
“If you ask me to come up with a solution of this problem or any relief to farmers right this very minute, there are none. This is a persistent problem, which seeks long term solution. We are doing that. We are in process of creating farmer-purchaser (mainly big companies using tomato as raw material) platform, which will be framed at the earliest possible time. But this problem is also there because farmers have grown tomato in unnecessarily extended areas,” claimed Horticulture Director Rajiv Kumar.
He also said that the government was trying hard to find an immediate market, but this might also not work at least in this season. He also went on counting long term relief like cold storages by government and things like agri-produce corridor which would help farmers in coming days to decide what kind of produce he needed to produce according to availability of market and sustainable price.
A senior official, however, blamed possible nexus between political class and middlemen which forced farmers, which wanted status quo to exist. “It is simply ironical to see that farmers grow something sometimes with the help of borrowed money and then are left abandoned to see that produce perishing in fields. But there are people in political class who nurture middlemen, who call farmers at kilometers away, don’t buy from them and when the farmer doesn’t have any choice than to sell it at whatever price is offered, they purchase it,” said the official in Jharkhand Agriculture Produce Marketing Board seeking anonymity.
However, he said that this problem was not going to stay for long. “The government is working on four fronts: constructing cold storages, finding new market, restricting production as per demand, and providing Minimum Support Price (MSP) which require many things to be worked out,” he added.