Statsguru: Are consumers paying exorbitant price for farm products?

Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan recently flagged a gap between prices paid by consumers and those received by farmers. Often, wholesale and consumer food prices are compared to broadly assess this. But the wholesale rates do not exactly reflect the prices farmers receive.

 

While one may take various commodities to gauge the additional prices consumers pay over wholesale rates, here we have assessed seven commodities – wheat and rice (cereals), mustard oil and vanaspati oil (edible oils), tomatoes, onions and potatoes (TOP).

 

Consumer price index (CPI) -based food inflation has been higher than its wholesale counterpart in four of the