In a bid to facilitate more shipments of fruits and vegetables, Apeda plans to strengthen the export infrastructure by setting up more packhouses and expanding the cold-supply chain over the next three years.

“We are going to focus heavily on creation of infrastructure, mainly setting up of packhouses for fruits and vegetables over the next three years,” said D K Singh, Chairman, Agriculture and Processed Foods Export Development Authority (Apeda).

At present there are 250 Apeda-approved packhouses and another 200 in the private sector across the country. “We expect another 200-250 to come up over the next three years. Apeda will provide an assistance of up to ₹75 lakh for each of the pack houses and will spend almost ₹100 crore towards the same,” said Singh.

Product-specific clusters The initial focus will initially be in the 11 identified product-specific clusters being created across seven States, including Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala, Meghalaya, Telangana, Gujarat and West Bengal, Singh added.

April-July exports up In the April-July period of the current financial year, fruit and vegetable exports saw a 7 per cent dip at ₹2,911 crore against ₹3,124 crore in the corresponding period last year. However, the overall exports of Apeda product portfolio grew 6.24 per cent in rupee terms at ₹37,013 crore for April-July period against ₹34,839 crore in corresponding last quarter.

This growth was primarily driven by almost a 25 per cent increase in basmati shipments, the largest product in the Apeda portfolio at ₹10,126 crore (₹8,139 crore in April-July 2016-17), followed by almost a flattish growth in buffalo meat at ₹7,326 crore (₹7,344 crore).

Non-basmati rice shipments registered a 10 per cent growth at ₹6,399 crore (₹5,821 crore), while guargum shipments almost doubled to ₹1,442 crore (₹751 crore) in value terms.

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