Uttar Pradesh shows the sweet side of sugarcane

Farmers are putting more land under sugarcane even as the acreage shrinks in other states

Had it not been for Uttar Pradesh’s stellar performance in the current sugar season that will end in September, the country would have been required to import a much larger volume of sugar than the sanctioned 500,000 tonnes to mitigate shortages in some regions. The season’s opening stock of 7.75 million tonnes (mt), built up due to good production since the start of the current decade, did not allow the pipeline to go dry at any stage. 

As a severe drought in 2016 visited some important cane growing states, shrinking the land under the crop for harvesting in 2016-17 season, sugar output in Maharashtra, traditionally the country’s largest producer of the sweetener, almost halved to 4.214 mt. Karnataka also met with the same fate, with production down to 2.03 mt from 3.92 mt in 2015-16. Incidentally, the two states, seen as the country’s most progressive in cane price administration, will be much ahead of other regions in recovering sugar from cane in normal times. 

A 5.5 per cent fall in land under cane to 4.991 million hectares in the country and drought related bad show by Maharashtra and Karnataka will see India, the world’s second largest producer of sugar after Brazil, ending the season in September with lowest output in seven years at 20.3 mt. Even while  the weather was not found to be entirely conducive, growers in UP committed 2.335 million hectares to growing cane, up 33,000 hectares over the 2015-16 season.  More than the extra land what came to the aid of UP to make a record 8.75 mt of sugar in 2016-17 was progressive replacement of conventional varieties of cane by high-yielding (HY) ones. 

Why did UP farmers decide to grow cane over a larger area this season when they had many bitter experiences of their cane bills running into hundreds of crores not being paid in time by sugar factories? Likely they have come to believe, like Vivek Saraogi, managing director of Balrampur Chini Mills, that the government’s evolving sugar policy is to rest on the premise that “if farmers are paid on time and remuneratively, then the health of this industry is assured.” The company hopes to crush 100 million quintals (mq) of cane in the season that will start from October, up from close to 80 mq during 2016-17.

The ground reality is that sugarcane gives better returns than either wheat or paddy and the government supporting the industry for resolution of cane dues played with farmers to give a thrust to cane production. The bane of the over Rs 80,000-crore industry on which depends the livelihood of 50 million farmers and 500,000 mill workers had for a long time been the government fixing prices of cane without seeing that factories would be able to recover raw material and other attendant costs by selling sugar in the market. What naturally followed was that bad times would be prolonged in the sugar cycle when factory losses would scale very high, and farmers would be kept anxiously waiting for months for payment of their cane bills. When their cash flow goes haywire over a long time, they are subject to great privation. 

Progressive groups such as EID Parry, Bannari Amman and Balrampur have reached out to farmers to educate them on what varieties of cane would suit a particular topography and ideal agricultural practices. For them, the priority has remained to pay for cane, conditions permitting, ahead of statutory period by way of online transfer to farmers’ bank accounts. Such interface between factories and farmers, though still confined to a few pockets, should become an industry-wide feature. Earlier this happens the better. 

Balrampur stands as a good example of interface between farmers and factory for other industry constituents to emulate for the good of all stakeholders. It’s hard work and also requires funding. As Balrampur will put it, to make interface result-yielding, factories will have to “make farmers’ business their own business.” Balrampur, which owns ten factories all in UP, approached cane development work in its command area by first carefully selecting three-four cane varieties that would grow well in the state, offering better recovery of sugar than is the case now. 

The reality is most farm practices have been passed on from generation to generation. Farmers are willing to do new things when they are given physical demonstration of contemporary systems and practices that will raise their income. Keeping this in view, Balrampur has created an army of  500 field workers who go from village to village telling farmers that the company will remain all along with them as they transition to growing early maturing HY varieties. Hand-holding goes beyond providing technical inputs relating to farming to providing seeds and bio-compost at subsidised rates and paying them on time for cane. 

Besides convincing farmers to replace conventional cane with HY types, Balrampur is also trying to persuade them to drop the age-old practice of sowing seeds in March and then harvesting the crop nine months later. Farmers, according to Balrampur, will hugely benefit by way of higher yield and avoid loss due to pests and diseases if they go for autumn planting and harvest the crop after a gap of 13 months. Some farmers are embracing the change. Seeing the more adventurous among them benefiting by switching over to autumn planting, many others have started falling in line. 

According to Saraogi, during  the 2016-17 season, early maturing cane and HY varieties had a 41 per cent share of total cane crushed by Balrampur. In the next two years, the target is to have 80 per cent HY varieties in its cane basket.