Government to handle Agrarian Crisis: cane growers and wheat farmers

News

• PM held a high level meeting to discuss concerns of farmers.
• Government to take steps to help sugar mills clear dues of over Rs 20,000 crore to cane growers and address quality concerns in wheat procurement after the recent spell of unseasonal rains.
• Paswan held two separate meetings earlier this month of farmers and chief ministers to resolve the cane arrears crisis.
• He would brief about the suggestions made by farmers and CMs to the PM for taking policy decisions.

Discussion

• The issue of raising import duty on sugar to 40 per cent from existing 25 per cent
• Creating buffer stock
• Restructuring of loan
• Promotion of ethanol output
• Export subsidy on white sugar

Reasons

• Sugar industry is facing difficulty in paying cane price to farmers as mills have been incurring losses for the last few years due to low realisation and high cost of production. Ex-mill prices of sugar have fallen to Rs 21-24/kg in the country, while the cost of production is over Rs 30/kg.
• Quality of wheat has been affected due to rains. Although the government has relaxed procurement norms in some states including Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, farmers are still facing problems in selling their produce to state-run FCI and other agencies because of wheat grain got damaged beyond permissible limit.