Issues related to the impact of areacnut on the domestic market dominated the 40th Annual General Meeting of Central Arecanut and Cocoa Marketing and Processing Cooperative (Campco) Ltd in Mangalore on Tuesday.
Many grower-members of the cooperative wanted to know the reasons for the sudden crash in the prices of white and red varieties of arecanut recently. K Padmanabha, President of Campco, said the prices of white and red arecanut had reached a maximum of ₹300 and ₹800 a kg, respectively, in the recent past. After a brief stint, the prices started coming down.
The cooperative infused funds and bought more arecanut from growers to arrest further fall. He attributed the large-scale import of the commodity as a main reason for this fall.
The cooperative approached the Union Ministry of Commerce seeking its intervention to control the arecanut import into the country. Following this, the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) initiated steps in August to increase the minimum import price of the arecanut from ₹110 a kg to ₹170 a kg. However, that decision could not be notified in the gazette. This followed a case filed by importers in the Calcutta High Court. A single judge bench of the court had ruled that DGFT did not have the power to fix or increase the import base price.
Following this, the DGFT had filed an appeal in the Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court against this order. The Division Bench has stayed the order of the Single Judge Bench, Padmanabha said.
The Campco President urged members to sell arecanut to the cooperative institutions that pay tax to the market. Some growers prefer to sell the commodity to private traders when the prices are good, and approach the cooperative when the prices start crashing. “Don’t sell the commodity to those who evade tax,” he said.