Focus on food processing

A lot more needs to be done to remove the constraints

Going by the recent claims made by the government in Parliament, its policies have incentivised private investment in the food processing sector to facilitate value-addition of farm produce and reduce its wastage. This assertion is correct to some extent as the sector has, of late, been clocking double-digit annual growth. Some of the official initiatives are well-designed to suit the industry and woo foreign investment. Between 2014 and March 2020, this sector received direct external investment of about $4.18 billion. With the changing lifestyle of people, especially that of the huge urban middle class, the household consumption of processed food items has also begun to look up, though the traditional preference for fresh foods does not seem to have waned.

The government’s initiatives that have helped the industry include the production-linked incentive scheme to facilitate the availability of world-class food products for the domestic and export market. It will also facilitate building of global brands to boost exports, which are already rising rapidly but still have untapped potential. Another well-thought-out scheme aims at promoting micro food processing units based on the concept of one-district-one-product to capitalise on the popularity of items like oranges of Nagpur or mangoes of Malihabad.
 

However, there is a lot more that needs to be done as the food processing industry still faces some formidable constraints that need to be addressed urgently if India intends to catch up with developed countries where a sizeable part of the produce is processed to add value and, more so, stretch their shelf life. That seems essential also to ensure year-round availability of food items, most of which are seasonal in nature. Both processing and preservation seem particularly vital in the case of mass consumed kitchen staples, such as potatoes, onions and tomatoes — collectively referred to as TOP. The key constraints include the limitations of supply chain infrastructure, seasonal production, lack of preliminary farm level freshness-retaining treatment, small scale of production, a lack of focus on quality and, the most forbidding, compulsion to source the raw material through the mandis run by the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs). Only a few states have exempted horticultural products like fruits and vegetables from their APMC Acts, allowing them to be traded directly between the producers and consumers or other end-users, including the processing units.

The fact also is that for a country like India where a sizeable part of the population lives in tiny villages with no or difficult access to the market, food preservation is as— if not more— important as food processing. This approach scores over the organised or unorganised sector food processing in terms of convenience as it can be practised at the household level. It has, in fact, been traditionally practised as a means of stretching the availability of seasonal foods. Conventional techniques like dehydration (sun drying), pickling (salted pickles or sweetened Murrabas) continue to be the chief methods of food preservation. There is a need for greater research and development effort to refine the preservation methods to retain the quality and safety of preserved foods by preventing their contamination by hazardous bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms. These are the most convenient means to make the available food go far.