Groundnut area declines as farmers shift to cash crops

Groundnut cultivation in the country is declining as farmers are shifting to other remunerative crops. While the crop was cultivated on 797,000 hectares during the 2009-10 season, the area has now come down to 700,000 hectares. Most of the farmers are shifting to cash crops like tobacco, cotton and maize, leading to a decline in the area under groundnut, officials said. During 2010-11, groundnut crop was estimated at 6.81 million tonnes.

Gujarat, which was once called the groundnut bowl of India, lost the crop to other remunerative crops like cotton during the last one decade. The state had 275,000-300,000 hectares under the crop during 2005-06, which has now declined to 155,600 hectares this year.

“The market for tobacco and maize is stable and prices are high. Maize has greater demand across the country as it is used as a feed for poultry and other such industries. In addition, the crop is risk-free and has no pest attack, which is making farmers to move to this crop,” said T Sriram Murthy, joint director of agriculture, Krishna district.

Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka are the major groundnut producing states in the country and they together contribute more than 80 per cent to the total crop.

In Andhra, the crop is cultivated on 300,000 hectares while in Karnataka this is a little over 200,000 hectares. The crop is cultivated in 122,000 hectares in Orissa, and around 100,000 hectares in Tamil Nadu, while West Bengal and Chhattisgarh have few thousands hectares under the crop.

The fall in the crop size is mostly because of the farmers shifting to the better commercial crops like tobacco and cotton in both Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, he said. Though the Tobacco Board had permitted the crop for 2010-11 in 115,846 hectares, farmers have spread it to 138,172 hectares in Andhra, while the crop size has gone up to 118,652.6 hectares this year against the permitted size of 78,852.2 hectares in Karnataka.

In Andhra, though the crop is cultivated mostly in the Rayalaseema region, it is also present in the two coastal districts of Krishna and Guntur. Farmers from the Palnadu region in Guntur district and Nuzvid division of Krishna district cultivate the crop.

Ironically, the yield too is coming down year after the year as the farmers are shifting to the more profitable crops.

Groundnut production in the country stood at 9.18 million tonnes in 2007-08, which had come down to 7.17 million tonnes in 2008-09. Gujarat witnessed a fall in the total production from 3.30 million tonnes in 2007-08 to 2.66 million tonnes in 2008-09. Similarly, in other states the production fell drastically. In Andhra, it was 2.60 million tonnes in 2007-08 and fell to 1.55 million tonnes in 2008-09, followed by 1.05 million tonnes to 0.97 million tonnes in Tamil Nadu and 0.73 million tonnes to 0.50 million tonnes in Karnataka.