Agri-business corporates should not expect any immediate big-ticket reforms in foodgrain procurement, public distribution system or APMC (Agricultural Produce Market Committee) laws and plan investments “assuming nothing will change with regard to these Big Elephants”.

This was the broad message from Prof Abhijit Sen, Member of the Planning Commission, at The Hindu Business Line -YES Bank Food and Agribusiness Conclave here on Monday.

“For all the talk we have had on these Big Elephants, there has been very little movement. (If at all), the movement will be very slow and it would be more useful to assume that nothing will change,” he said, implicitly referring to the political resistance to allowing corporates to procure produce directly from farmers and opening up multi-brand retail to foreign investors.

Shift focus to small and micro

Prof Sen's views were seconded by Mr R. Mukundan, Managing Director of Tata Chemicals Ltd, who felt that “policy changes will come, but with a delay” and “we will have to make things profitable in spite of that”. Companies, he added, should shift their focus from the “big” to the “small and micro”.

Mr Mukundan saw a major role for the private sector in seeds (especially hybrids), fertilisers and pesticides, which he likened to the Brahma (creator), Vishnu (nourisher) and Shiva (enemy destroyer) of agriculture.

Within fertilisers, there was a need to move away from bulk products such as urea and di-ammonium phosphate to customised, crop-specific and soil-specific solutions that also address the deficiency of zinc and other micro-nutrients.

In pesticides, too, Mr Mukundan pointed to a diversification of the industry's product line from just insecticides to herbicides and weedicides, in view of the rising farm labour costs. Besides seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, the private sector could do much more in areas such as extension services and agro-practices from laser levelling to drip irrigation.

Earlier, in his keynote address at the one-day Conclave, Mr Ashok Sinha, Secretary, Ministry of Food Processing Industries, said the Centre's Mega Food Parks scheme is off the ground after the initial teething problems. While two projects at Hardwar (Uttarakhand) and Chittoor (Andhra Pradesh) are in advanced stages of implementation, “we are working on 13 other parks out of the total 30 proposed in the 11th Plan”, he noted.

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