| |August 20189CIOReviewprices could be anything from 10 Rs/ to 100Rs/-. So can the frozen cauli-flower be a substitute when prices are high? No, as long as fresh is available, frozen has little preference. People might reduce the quantity to adjust the budget but would not replace it with frozen.It is said that less than 4% of In-dia's perishable is transported by cold chain, compare the same to the UK, it is >90%. Refer transportation as a solution to the post-harvest loss is easier said than done for the simple reason that we do not have an end to end cold chain. The last mile connec-tivity of the hawkers/vendors does not have the cold chain infrastruc-ture. The F&V which when moved in refer & taken out to ambient en-vironment deteriorates faster. Addi-tional cost load of cold chain is also not competitive either. The solution, therefore, is not a cold chain but the ventilated, air circulated & humidi-fied transport. There is a wide range of traditional packaging adopted for transportation of different items like a bamboo basket in combination with banana leaves at Barpeta in As-sam, wet gunny bags with ice cubes for beetle leaves in Orissa, wooden boxes with straw for Alphonso man-go at Ratnagiri. These are traditional, low cost, and highly efficient in pre-serving F&V during the transit. But not much research has taken place to standardize these for logistic or ac-counting requirements.Small farmers keep growing dif-ferent vegetable throughout the year. But unless there is scale of production in a cluster, markets do not develop as the cost of aggregation becomes high. Over a period of time, many commodity clusters have emerged as kind of national mandi like onion at Nashik, tomato at Kolar or potato at Agra. But these are only the tip of the iceberg. There are numerous tiny mandi/haats (about 22,000) which transact even less a kg of F&V. Un-less there is a multi-tier aggregation, these actually cannot become a logis-tically viable volume for a commer-cial lot. But, greater the aggregation, greater would be the quality variation and lesser return. This is endemic to most of the mandi/haats of Bihar, Bengal & Assam.Another easy solution suggested most often is to "eliminate the mid-dleman or de-layer the supply chain". It is easy to delayer the chain but not easy to delayer the costs. Formal or-ganizations often add costs; there are delays in decision making and are bound by compliances or internal rules. F&V deteriorates and deterio-rates at a faster rate as time elapses. Losses pile up with the progression of time. So most organized players tend to lose for their own reasons of the organization. While the small player/ vendors are efficient in opera-tion, it is difficult to scale up or repli-cate their operations. Farm acreage sown is largely a function the previous years' return and not on the future opportunities of sale. Farmer is always tempted to sow more if he had a good return on the previous year and also the vice-versa. As a result of this, there is cyclical high & low availability. This leads to a sharp rise or fall of prices. When there is disproportion-ate rise in prices, many speculators, traders or hoarders get into the trade, making it further complicated and unreasonable. The trade gains in up-trend situations while farmers lose on downtrend. There are no formal or informal planning mechanisms to manage quantity, time or the loca-tion of sowing. Farmers lose out considerable value as they do a little on post-harvest management of sorting, grading & packing. There exists op-portunity in the standardisation of pack size across the commodities & geographies. Today, major govern-ment investments are intended to create production technology and a little allocation on post-harvest, fresh distribution or market creation. But, yet there are positive developments like the use of standard boxes in ap-ple trade in Himachal or use of crates in tomato trade of Nashik or selling Alphonso by size grade at Ratnagiri. It would be case-study to see how Washington apple penetrated deep into Indian villages. Crop planning if adopted could improve availability for the consumers and price realiza-tion for farmers. Crop planning if adopted could improve availability for the consumers and price realization for farmers Mihir Mohanta
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