With an aim to doubling the agricultural exports, the Ministry of Commerce has come up with a draft “Agriculture Export Policy” to integrate Indian farmers and agricultural products to the global value chain.
The draft policy includes stable trade policy regime, reforms in the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) Act, streamlining of Mandi fee and liberalisation of land, and seeks to double the shipments by 2022.
The draft policy also said monopoly of the APMC prevents private players from setting up markets and investing in market infrastructure. APMC across states have not been able to achieve the farmers’ welfare envisaged in these acts.
“Efforts will continue with State Governments to remove perishables from their APMC Act. State Governments would also be urged to standardise/rationalise mandi taxes for largely exported agricultural products,” it added.
Simplification or uniformity of mandi/agricultural fee across States will create a transparent supply chain that will empower the farmer, provide him wider access to markets and enable free trade across the country, it said.
The policy made a strong case for promoting contract farming as it would help in attracting investments. To promote infrastructure and logistics boost, it suggested that a comprehensive need-gap analysis of existing export oriented infrastructure across the value chain is critical to formulating an export oriented policy.
The Ministry has sought views of the stakeholders on the draft till April 5.
Elaborating on the stable trade policy regime, it said that given the domestic price and production volatility of certain agricultural commodities, there has been a tendency to utilise the policy as an instrument to attain short-term goals of taming inflation, providing price support to farmers and protecting the domestic industry.