Shillong, Jun 24: Agriculture Minister Timothy D Shira today said that Meghalaya is trying to attain self-sufficiency in food production through high yield rice and other diversified crops.
He also said that the state government is promoting organic farming and recently Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman inaugurated the North East’s largest organic spice processing unit in Ri-Bhoi at Bhoirymbong.
Shira said that farmers are showing keen interest and growing various crops like turmeric, ginger and bringing produce to processing units where they get better prices “because they need not depend on traders (middlemen) coming from outside. Cooperative societies, self-help groups, are replacing the traders coming from outside.”
The minister also said that farmers are growing organic produce and rejecting chemical fertilisers. “It is distributed free of cost and no one takes it,” he added. “The fertilisers supplied to the farmers go to Bangladesh.”
The one exception to this, according to Shira, is the plain belt of Garo Hills where farmers use chemical fertilisers extensively.
He said that it has been proved that use of chemical fertilisers in vegetables and other agricultural products is causing health hazards, though the evidence for this is debatable and more nuanced.
The enthusiasm for organic agriculture is not uniform in Meghalaya. In fact, it is the current government that reintroduced fertiliser subsidies that had been turned off by the previous Congress Party-led government in 2014. The Congress, at the time, had done so ostensibly to push the state towards organic farming.
