Nurturing horticulture

Constraints in the sector must be addressed

Going by the agriculture ministry’s latest crop assessment, the production of fruit, vegetables and other horticultural products rose to a new high of 331 million tonnes in 2020-21, outpacing the food grain output of 306 million tonnes for the ninth year in a row. This trend, notably, has endured despite low developmental effort, public funding, and policy support to horticulture in comparison to grain crops. Measures like minimum support prices are unavailable for fruit and vegetables, though most of these crops are grown by resource-poor small landholders with a meagre risk-bearing capacity. Yet, the uptrend in production remained intact even during the longish drought between 2016 and 2018. The horticultural revolution can, thus, be deemed more impressive than the much-acclaimed green revolution. This is borne out by the fact that horticultural production has spurted 13-fold since 1950, against only around a six-fold rise in food grain output. The increase, significantly, is attributable more to the productivity upswing than area expansion.

Horticulture now accounts for nearly 30 per cent of the agriculture sector’s output, which comprises field crops, animal husbandry, fisheries, and forestry. Little wonder, therefore, that India has emerged as the world’s second-largest producer of fruit and vegetables, next only to China. It tops in the output of fruit and vegetables like mango, banana, guava, lemon and okra, and is the second-largest grower of potato, onion, tomato, cabbage, cauliflower, brinjal, and a few other crops. However, the past achievements do not call for any complacency in boosting this sector further. The reasons for this are several. For one, most horticultural crops, thanks to their inherent high yield and greater market value, are more lucrative than other crops. Besides, these crops are relatively climate-resilient and need less water and other inputs to grow. They, therefore, can be the potential alternatives to environment-unfriendly field crops to diversify agriculture. The United Nations has declared 2021 as the international year of fruit and vegetables to enhance farmers’ income and improve consumers’ nutrition.
 

Indeed, the horticulture sector continues to face several constraints, which mar its growth prospects. The development of infrastructure for the post-harvest management of horticultural produce, for instance, has failed to keep pace with growth in production. Cold stores, needed for the safe upkeep of surplus output, are scarce. So are the refrigerated transport vehicles and the facilities for pre-marketing grading, packaging and processing of these products. The result, evidently, is very high wastage of the output of these perishable and semi-perishable products. Some estimates put these losses at a massive 30 to 40 per cent, valued roughly at around Rs 2 trillion a year. Hardly around 3 per cent of horticultural produce is processed into value-added and shelf life-enhanced products. This compares poorly with many other countries where the bulk of the output is processed to prolong the shelf life and ensure the year-round availability of horticultural products. The marketing of these perishable and delicate products, too, is in bad shape. Growers often fail to recover their production costs, especially during the post-harvest peak marketing seasons. They are at times forced to throw their perishable produce on roads to protest against unremunerative prices. These issues need to be addressed urgently to ramp up the production and consumption of fruit, vegetables, and other high-value and nutrition-dense horticultural products.