Hyderabad, July 06: Stating that he was against Kuppam type of cooperative agriculture system which was a replica of corporate farming, Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy today pitched for the proposed cooperative agriculture system in the State.
In an open letter to the farmers, he stated that the sole aim of the Government was to make agriculture more remunerative. He wrote this letter after having interaction with the agriculture experts before leaving for East Godavari district here today.
The Chief Minister in his letter stated that cooperative farming would come to the rescue of the farmers who were suffering with lack of access to bank loans, technology and other inputs.
Cooperative agriculture would insulate the farmers from the vagaries of nature and would help them to sustain their economic status, he assured.
With the advent of economic reforms in the country in 1991 the agriculture growth rate had come down to 2.2 percent, the Chief Minister stated. After the introduction of free power, the production of foodgrains has crossed 200 lakh tonnes, he informed. Waiver of loans, irrigation to 21 lakh acres, rise in the minimum support price and copious rains in the five years have helped the agriculture sector to register about 6 percent annual growth, the Chief Minister recalled.
The cooperative agriculture concept was discussed with several experts and lot of thought was given to it, he explained. Implementation of this concept was a Herculean task and the objective of this concept was to give handful of work to every farmer, provision of irrigation to every acre, improvement of milk production, sheep rearing and taking up other allied activities with Rs 100 crore for each village, the Chief Minister explained.
In the rest of the world five percent of the farmers were engaged in farming and the others were taking value addition, processing, packaging and marketing activity, he informed.
Such a participation was helping them to raise the revenue on farm production four times the Chief Minister stated and added that the incomes of our farmers were equal to the 5 percent farmers of other countries.
He stated that land holding would become more smaller with more and more joining the agriculture sector.
In the near future about 80 percent would be holders of less than two acres, the exponent of cooperative farming stated.
As the farmers were feeling that the only job they have to do was just producing the crops was denying them the opportunity to enter into other allied activities, he said. If they take up collective agriculture the costs would come down, Rajasekhara Reddy informed.
Giving an example of how the cooperative farming could be done, he said that out of the 500 farmers in a village 100 would take part in farm activities and other 400 would take part in poultry, horticulture, sericulture, fishing and dairy activities.
With cooperative farming a farmer could earn about Rs 50,000 per acre in one year instead of Rs 10,000, he stated and added that in the other countries the farmers were earning about Rs 2 lakh per acre per annum.
The objective of cooperative farming was to encourage farmers to set up enterprises, Rajasekhara Reddy stated. He assured that no farmer would be forced to enter into cooperative farming.
–Agencies–