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Meet stresses need to streamline and fund agro-processing segment

Maharashtra Chief Minister Manohar Joshi today said that the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance government will lay emphasis on profitability of the agriculture sector apart from increasing its productivity so that farmers derive maximum benefits.

Speaking at Agro-Food Tech '98, a four-day international exposition in Agro-Advantage Maharashtra global investors' convention in Bombay, Joshi said that the need of the hour was to make the farmer self-reliant and not just stress higher production.

The new agriculture policy of the state government gives importance to careful use of water, availability of seeds, pesticides and fertilisers in time for the farmers, improving the quality of agriculture research and making the farmers aware of the findings of the research, easing the process of land deals, distribution, creating basic infrastructure for sale and import of the agriculture produce. The state government is committed to chalk out welfare schemes for adivasis, backward class, small land owners and farm labourers, Joshi stated.

Union secretary for food processing industries P S Bhatnagar said banks and financial institutions must evolve specialised mode of financing for the agro-processing industry in order to ensure adequate credit availability at affordable terms.

While extending credit, the banks and financial institutions must also extend help of technologists and business managers to their clients so that they can utilise the funds in a proper and productive manner, he said.

While the agriculture sector is treated as a priority sector for lending by banks and institutions, similar consideration is not available to the agro-processing sector in spite of the fact that the development of agriculture is largely dependent on agro processing industry, he observed.

He said that the large raw material base of agricultural produce in the country requires a massive infrastructure of post-harvest management, cold chain and processing.

While the estimated losses of fruits and vegetable alone are of the order of Rs 50 billion in a year due to lack of infrastructure facilities, the capacity utilisation of food processing industries in India is only 40 per cent. This left an opportunity for massive upgradation of infrastucture and capacity utilisation as well as the post-harvest handling practices and technology, he said.

The size of Indian food market may grow from Rs 250 billion at present to Rs 500 billion by 2005 and the share of value-added foods is likely to increase from Rs 800 billion to Rs 2.25 trillion.

The Netherlands' Rabo Bank managing director Hans Hannart said that the size of Indian agro-processing industry has to be big enough to achieve the economies of scale in production thereby reducing the cost of finished products.

To develop larger food and agro-based companies, he said that there was a need to have specialised financing institutions that could offer products such as advisory services, project financing, equity, merger and acquisition and asset financing.

He indicated that his bank, a leading Dutch agro-based financial firm, would set up a venture capital corpus in the name of India Fund for investment in agriculture related activities. It had already identified ten projects in Maharashtra for development with the help of international investors.

UNI

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