COMMODITY OUTLOOK AND SITUATION ANALYSIS

Weekly Report : 07-13, July, 2019

Pulses Prices Rise 1-8% after Govt

Raises MSP this Season

New Delhi: Pulses prices have risen by 1-8% after the

government raised the

minimum support prices

(MSP) for the ongoing kharif

season. Traders and analysts

expect the prices to increase

further, with most pulses are

selling below the MSP. They say prices are also rising due to

lower crop acreage and rising demand for pulses.

“In the Delhi spot market, masoor price has increased by

7.4% to ₹4,350 per quintal, chana by 4% to ₹4,340 while

moong by of 3% to ₹6,200 in the past one week after the

increased MSP was announced,” said Anuj Gupta, deputy VP

research, commodities, Angel Broking. He said urad and tur

prices too increased by 1% to ₹4,925 and ₹5,650.

Other reasons for rising prices are pre-festival season

demand, higher consumption of pulses and restricted imports,

said Prerana Desai, head of research at Edelweiss Agri

Services and Credit. She said prices will go up since there has

been lower planting for tur (arhar), moong and urad. The area

for pulses has fallen 20% to 27.51 lakh hectare, according to

government data.

“Traders are buying pulses ahead of the festive season which

begins in August. Also, with the onset of monsoon, demand

for chana used for flour and other food items has increased.

The sharp restriction of yellow peas import too has contributed

to the firming up of prices,” said Desai. A trader said chana

prices are also increasing since besan manufacturers do not

appear to be mixing yellow peas, maize and broken rice in it.

“Both maize and broken rice are much in demand by the

animal feed industry and, hence, we see chana demand

increasing,” the person said, requesting anonymity. “Most of

the pulses are still selling below the MSP and there is scope

for a further increase,” said Sanjeev Kumar Chadha, MD,

National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation

(Nafed) which is holding 40 lakh tonne of tur, chana, moong,

urad and masoor.

Chadha said that even with deficit rain and less area

under pulses, the buffer stock will ensure steady supplies for

the special welfare schemes across 12 states in the country

and steady availability in the market.

Oilseeds, Pulses Planting Falls Sharply

due to Weak Rainfall

New Delhi:

Plantation of oilseeds and

pulses, which India imports

heavily, has fallen sharply

because of weak rainfall till

now but this can change soon

as the government has

announced higher support prices and the monsoon is now on

the upswing. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her

budget speech on Friday, had urged farmers to make a big

success in planting oilseeds just as they had done in pulses in

recent years. India is a heavy importer of cooking oil because

inadequate oilseed production leads to a huge shortfall in

domestic production of the cooking medium. Sitharaman had

also listed “selfsufficiency and export of foodgrains, pulses,

oilseeds, fruits and vegetables” among the 10 points in the

government’s vision for the economy. Crop planting as on last

Friday was 26% below last year, a much bigger gap than 9.5%

a week ago although the rainfall deficit narrowed from 44% in

mid-June to 23% on Friday.

Agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar is hopeful of early

recovery because the monsoon has improved significantly.

“Situation is under control. Cultivation area will soon increase.

IMD has predicted a normal monsoon and we are hopeful

things will improve fast,” he said. He also said the centre is

monitoring the situation closely with states and would take

every step to deal with any calamity. “Even it rains profusely,

there are parts which remains parched. So that is not a

problem. We are in touch with every state governments and

plans are afoot to deal with any situation,” he had said.

Due to delayed monsoon, farmers have sown crops over

23.43 million ha — down by 8.53 million ha from 31.96 million

ha last year. During the entire kharif season, farmers sow

around 106.36 million ha of land. “The shortfall is mainly due

to drop in acreage of pulses and oilseeds. The area of pulses

is down by 70% while that of oilseeds is down by around 43%.

The shortfall in paddy is 24% while the drop-in area of coarse

cereals, which includes maize, jowar, ragi and bajra, is around

26.5%,” said an agriculture department official. The

government recently announced minimum support price

(MSP) for kharif crops where it has hiked MSP of oilseeds like

groundnut, sunflower, soyabean, sesamum and nigerseeds in

the range from ₹200 a quintal to ₹311 a quintal. “Now that

the new MSP has been announced and monsoon covering

more areas, sowing activities will go up covering the shortfall.

The rains in July and August are important for crops,” said an

agriculture department official. The met department has

predicted advancement of rains in Haryana, Punjab and

Madhya Pradesh.

CAMPCO to slash price of wet cocoa

beans purchased from traders from

today

There will be no reduction in the price of beans being

procured from farmers, says cooperative

Central Arecanut and Cocoa Marketing and Processing

Cooperative Ltd. (CAMPCO) will reduce the price of wet cocoa

beans being purchased from traders by ₹5 a kg – from ₹50 to

₹45 a kg – from Monday. However, there will be no reduction

in the price of beans being procured from farmers, said

Suresh Bhandary M., MD, CAMPCO. CAMPCO is one of the

principal buyers of cocoa. It buys cocoa mainly from farmers

and partially from traders.

Mr. Bhandary told The Hindu that

the cooperative had observed that

some traders were now mixing

water with wet beans. Hence, the

yield from wet to dry beans has

dropped. The cooperative will

reduce the procurement price for traders for this reason. Since

cocoa procurement season began in April, there has been

remarkable increase in the arrival of wet beans to the

cooperative compared to earlier years. CAMPCO since last

month purchased about 20 tonnes of wet beans a day against

six to seven tonnes a day in earlier years. This could be

attributed to two factors, he said. According to farmers, cocoa

flowers have not been lost due to scanty rainfall since last

month. Hence, there is good crop in this season. Usually, the

coastal belt is soaked with heavy rains during June-July

resulting in loss of flowers and heavy moisture content in wet

beans. This trend has reversed this year.

Secondly, other major multinational chocolate manufacturers

who have enough stock of imported dry cocoa beans are not

purchasing wet beans in huge quantities. Hence, farmers and

traders who otherwise were selling the beans to them are now

selling them to the cooperative, he said.

The MD said the annual requirement of dry beans of the

cooperative at its chocolate factory in Puttur will be about

4,200 tonnes. It procured about 2,600 tonnes of wet beans

annually. He said that an advanced new machine procured

from Turkey for the production of choco chips at the factory

was commissioned about a fortnight ago. The machine has

the capacity to produce 10 tonnes of choco chips per day.

Now, it is producing six tonnes of chips a day. The existing

machine at the factory produced about three tonnes of choco

chips a day. Hence, the factory now produced nine tonnes a

day. Choco chips are used by food and cosmetic industries.

Indian Pepper too Hot to Handle, Loses

Out to Cheap Vietnam Stuff

Kochi: Indian black pepper continues to lose ground to the

cheaper Vietnamese variety in the world market while increasing

illegal imports through Nepal are keeping domestic prices in

check. Vietnam is selling the commodity at $2,800 per tonne, less

than half the price of $6,000 per tonne commanded by the Indian

variety. “Vietnam is currently dominating the global market. Even

Indonesian pepper, at $3,200 per tonne, is cheaper than ours,”

said Rajiv Palicha, chairman of the All India Spices Exporters

Forum. India has been losing its competitive edge in pepper

exports in the past few years as production has increased in

Vietnam, Indonesia and Brazil.

In 2017-18, pepper exports from India slumped 40%

compared to those two years ago to 16,840 tonnes, the lowest

in recent times. In 2018-19, as per data from the Spices

Board, shipments fell 25% year-on-year in the nine months

to December 2018. Exporters said shipments for the full

financial year could be 15,000 tonnes. Significantly, majority

of the shipments from India are value added exports of

imported varieties, mostly from Vietnam. The share of Indian-

origin pepper in exports has gone down as the spice from

other countries has become cheaper. Domestic pepper prices

are hovering around ₹350 per kg. While the import of

Vietnamese pepper through Sri Lanka has diminished with

increased monitoring, illegal flow of pepper through Nepal has

increased.

India lowers duty on 400,000 tonnes of corn

importsas prices jump

MUMBAI: India lowered import taxes on an additional

400,000 tonnes of corn to 15%, the government said on

Tuesday, to offset a rise in the price of animal feed in the

country following a drought last year. India allowed imports

of 100,000 tonnes of corn at the concessional tax rate in

June. The additional 400,000

tonnes of imports were permitted

at the same rate following a

request from the poultry

industry, the government said in

a statement.

India, the world's seventh-biggest corn producer, normally

imposes a 60% import tax on the grain, but an infestation of

the fall armyworm, which devastated African crops in 2017,

and dry weather in some areas have cut the country's corn

output. Amit Saraogi, managing director of Anmol Feeds Pvt.

Ltd., said the shortage of corn had been hurting the cattle

feed industry since last year and the additional imports would

help to bring down prices.

India was a major exporter of corn to southeast Asia until

falling output and increasing demand from poultry producers

and corn starch manufacturers turned it into an importer a

few years ago. The switch in India's position cheered rival

suppliers such as Brazil, Argentina and the United States,

which have now replaced New Delhi in the southeast Asian

market. India, which does not allow the cultivation of any

genetically modified food crops, has rules designed to ensure

that imports contain no trace of genetically modified

organisms.

These seed bankers are saving India’s

native crops

It was in 2001 that Sangita Sharma set up Annadana, a seed

bank with 20 varieties of indigenous seeds on her five-acre

farm in Bengaluru. Eighteen years later, her bank is richer by

800 varieties of desi seeds that

are cheaper and more nutritious

than hybrid varieties. The

history of Indian agriculture goes

back 10,000 years. Over

centuries, nature picked the

most resilient seeds that thrived in Indian conditions without

help of chemicals and fertilisers. Our native seeds. However,

they lost out to high-yielding hybrid seeds introduced in the

1960s as part of the green revolution. Dr Debal Deb, a plant

scientist and rice conservationist in Odisha, says that India

was home to 1,10,000 varieties of rice till 1970. Of these only

6,000 survive today.

Today, individuals like Sharma are reviving the food diversity

of India by preserving desi seeds from all over India. “I love

food. And I wanted to know where it comes from,” says the

former communications professional who now farms and

preserves seeds for a living.

At Dr Prabhakar Rao’s farm near Bengaluru, visitors can see

a number of desi vegetables in bloom. Red bhindi, red corn,

violet peppers and tomatoes in at least four different colours

including blue and yellow. Varieties that we never get to see

in the market. “India has lost 99% of biodiversity in

vegetables,” says Dr Rao, an agricultural scientist who started

collecting native seeds seven years ago, and today has 540 in

his bank called Hariyalee.

To reintroduce these varieties to people, Rao holds farming

workshops that attract urban farmers, terrace gardeners,

students and scientists. “Most people don’t know a crucial fact

about native seeds: they cannot be grown using chemicals. If

I add urea to a native wheat variety, it will grow tall grow tall

but easily snap in the wind. In contrast, GMO and hybrid seeds

cannot grow without the use of fertilizers and pesticides. Also,

they are designed to not reproduce. This ensures that the

farmer has to go back to the seed corporation every sowing

season to buy seeds,” says Rao, who started his career during

the green revolution but had a change of heart when he

realised the long-term unsustainability of chemical

agriculture.

A software engineer by profession, Babita Bhatt left a

corporate career in Gurugram three years ago, and moved to

Dehradun along with her husband Alok to preserve heirloom

seeds. She also set up an e-store, Himalaya2home, to sell

these seeds and other products like native dals, oils and

flours. “There’s so much pesticide in our food. Cancer cases

are increasing. What is happening to our food chain is

obviously affecting our health,” says Bhatt, who sources seeds

from all over Uttarakhand. She introduced a desi variety of

black rice, indigenous to Imphal valley, to some local farmers.

“I figured that the climate conditions in Doon and Imphal are

similar and decided to experiment. The rice has taken very

well to Dehradun,” she adds. However, the local Type 3

Dehradun basmati, famous for its fragrance and long grains,

is no longer the same. “Paddy here was grown with water fed

from mountain streams. Now, the streams have little water

left in them or it’s contaminated. So, while the desi variety is

around, it has lost its aroma,” says Bhatt. On her e-store, she

sells 15 varieties of rajma sourced from valleys across the

state, like Henval, Bhagirathi, Johar, Alaknanda and Doon.

One of her suppliers is Vijay Jardhari from Jardhar village in

Henval valley, Tehri-Garhwal. Jardhari, 67, runs Beej Bachao

Andolan, a social initiative to preserve seeds native to

Uttarakhand. A key figure in the Chipko movement, Jardhari

started collecting native seeds in 1985-86, and today has

around 150 varieties of rice and 200 varieties of rajm, in

addition to desi vegetables. Of the rice varieties, some like

tapachini and jhamcha, yield 70 quintals/hectare. In

comparison, Pusa RH 10, a hybrid basmati, yields 65

quintals/hectare. “Native varieties act like vaccines,” says

Jardhari. “You have them in the season and you are recharged

for the rest of the year. If you eat kulath dal (horse gram) two

to three times in winter, it will prevent stone formation. If you

have stones, then drinking its water will help dissolve them,”

says Jardhari, who is invited to many sustainable farming

conventions both in India and abroad.

Though Jardhari’s claims stem from traditional knowledge

of farmers and don’t necessarily have scientific backing, there

are many converts. Cancer survivor Amit Vaidya is one of

those. “Hybrid tomatoes can’t be stewed the same way as desi

tomatoes. Their skin comes off differently. Native beetroot

varieties are softer, sweeter and darker in colour indicating a

higher concentration of antioxidants. I know where my food

comes from and it makes all the difference,” says Vaidya, who

lives on Vypin island, near Kochi. Sharma of Annadana says

it’s time the government steps in to preserve native seeds.

“State horticulture farms can start using them,” says Sharma,

who’s looking for collaborations to create more community

seed banks.

Source : Verbatim reproduced from different sources