In what should be a huge relief to farmers, the state government will offer price support for produce that is witnessing a decline in value thereby protecting agriculturists from having to sell off their crops at massive losses.
The cabinet today approved the new CM ASSURE market intervention scheme to support small and marginal farmers by providing fixed price procurement during market price decline.
Unlike other states in India, mostly rural Meghalaya does not offer farmers minimum support prices (MSPs) and CM ASSURE is not like the MSP guarantees found elsewhere. Many states have witnessed intense protests undertaken by farmers to push back against national and state plans to reduce or reform agricultural sector support.
The government made it clear that the price protection will be activated by a state-level committee only during price drops and will not be a guaranteed annual feature. The support will only be applicable to non-perishable commodities with longer shelf lives, such as broom, turmeric, ginger and areca (betel) nut. If the price of these goods falls dramatically, the government will step in and pay a higher than market rate for them. Given, however, that these are non-perishable, the state will be able to hold them until the price rises in order to cut its losses.
That leaves growers of fruit and vegetables that have shorter shelf lives, such as tomatoes for example, not covered by CM ASSURE.
The state government has budgeted a revolving corpus fund of Rs 100 crore, while assistance of Rs 20 crore will be provided by the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs.
This year only those involved in the harvesting of broom and areca nut will be covered under the scheme as these two products have witnessed sharp declines in price. The details of procurement price, quantum to be procured and other scheme modalities will be notified by the Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare at a later date.
