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Agricultural Marketing, rather than production, is going to
be the key driver of the agriculture sector today, thanks to
the new market realities posed by the increasing accent on
globalization, liberalization and privatization of the
economy. Market-driven production is an idea whose time has
come. With the gradual shifting of agricultural system from
subsistence to commercial one, there is increasing focus on
Agripreneurship and Agri-marketing. It is the need of the
time to tune up the Agricultural Marketing System of the
country to enable the farmers to face the new challenges and
reap the opportunities as well. This summons us to revisit
our traditional statistic policies and laws and bring about
the requisite reforms in the sector.
The imperatives of the integration of the Agricultural
Marketing System of the country are increasingly posing new
challenges in respect of each of the components of the
system such as- cleaning, grading, quality certification,
packaging, storage, transportation, financing, wholesaling
and retailing etc of agriculture produce. The subtlety of
the management of Agricultural Marketing issues today calls
for high degree of professionalism to measure up to the
expectations of different stakeholders.
Internal reforms in traditional agricultural marketing
system of the country have become indispensable to enable
our farmers to tap into the external market of the post-WTO
regime. Now that many states have introduced some reforms in
agricultural marketing, the need of the hour is to
consolidate the gain of reforms through appropriate policies
and plans. The existing trade barriers have to be removed
for evolving a common market in India. There is a need to
give a push to processing and value addition. Cost
effectiveness through integrated supply chain management has
become sine qua non in the present world trade environment.
This demands doing away with the dysfunctional aspects of
the present regulated marketing system by putting in place a
responsive market information system, need-based price
discovery mechanism, measures to solve the problem of
economies of scale at the grass root level by promoting
contract farming, direct marketing and private investment in
agricultural marketing infrastructure.
Congenial investor-friendly economic environment has got to
be evolved to attract the private investors to invest in
agricultural marketing sector for bridging the existing gap
in the agricultural marketing infrastructure of the country.
Farmers should get freedom of choice to use a physical
market giving them services for the fees paid by them. This
could be possible through dismantling of the monopoly of the
Government-owned markets and permitting setting up markets
in the private sector, thereby bringing healthy competition
in the sector. This also calls for the traditional
Government mandies to be spruced up in terms of their
management, infrastructure, service delivery,
customer-friendliness through fine-tuning of their internal
processes. The other areas of reforms such as promotion of
grading and standardization, market-led extension,
rationalization of market fees, public- private partnership
in owning and management of markets etc will go a long way
towards pushing the system to the next level of excellence.
The focus on reforms calls for a paradigm shift in our
approach. |
