Plunge in tomato price hits farmers hard

Anantapur-Puttaparthi:  Tomato, the queen vegetable of Telugu kitchen which should be highly profitable for farmers given its perennial demand, is huge causing losses to farmers. A couple of months ago the price of tomato was Rs 80 per a kilogram. The same is today Rs10 in retail market. The farmer who is the producer gets less than Rs 5 while the wholesale market price is around Rs 5 per kg.

No kitchen can imagine a tasty curry without tomatoes. Such steep fall in tomato prices is not good for the farmers producing them. Despite the tomato market experiencing price crash to such a rock-bottom level, government stands as a mute spectator. The previous YSRCP government promised price statbilisation fund with Rs 3,000 crore corpus, but nothing happened in five years.

Before the tomatoes arrived at the wholesale market, the produce is purchased at Rs 2-3 per kilogram by the middlemen right at farms. It is obvious that the farmers are not getting even transportation costs, let alone production cost. Desperate farmers have even thrown their crop away or let it rot in field without harvesting.

Many questions come to the fore, including absence of cold storage facility to preserve their produce for a few days and wait for a remunerative price and also the need for tomato processing centres.

These processing centres help to preserve produce in a value added form and actually boost its price and demand.

Local market forces are united in preventing external traders from purchasing tomatoes from local farmers directly at higher price.

Market yards too can play an active role by standing for the farmers and preventing middlemen and even local market forces dictating terms to farmers. Farmers should sell their produce through the market yards. Instead of the local traders, the market yards representing government should play a commanding role.

Krishna Reddy, a tomato farmer from Kalyandurg in a chat with ‘The Hans India’ regretted that the price crash occurred every year but the government instead of acting on the problem is only reacting to a panicky situation.

Secondly, farmers have been demanding that tomato growing mandals should have at least one tomato processing centre each for a mandal or two mandals.

Tomatoes are produced in 22,500 hectare in the district. The syndicated farmers don’t purchase the tomatoes for more than their syndicated amount. Neither will they allow outside traders to participate in auction purchases. The local traders and middlemen see to it that only their writ runs large in the market.

These market forces are making huge profits running to crores by selling them at higher prices.

The tomato farmers want to know if the government would answer their questions on establishing processing centres, fixing of minimum support price and involving of market yards to stand for farmers.