Editorial
Govt purchase should speed up
Ensure fair price to producers
Like in the past, this season, too, farmers are faced with a worry of being deprived of fair price for their produces, despite bumper production of boro rice. The problem has been further compounded by the delay in the government's buying the produce from farmers.
Farmers' plight is rooted in a multiple of factors. Since boro is grown in winter, peasants have to depend on irrigated water to grow it. Erratic supply of electricity as well as high price of diesel to run irrigation pump add to cost of producing rice. But the middlemen, who buy the rice before it is sold to the wholesalers, as always, cheat the farmers on price on various pretexts.
The irony is the market price of rice is still very high compared to what the farmers get when they sell their products to the middlemen or even the government. Obviously, the middlemen and the wholesalers mostly eat up what farmers could get had they any bargaining power.
Thus to get any return out of their bumper harvest, their hope hinges on the yearly government purchase of rice. This year, they were compelled to sell a part of their harvest to the middlemen as the government did not start the buying earlier.
Unfortunately, it has become a regular pattern that farmers do not get a fair price for their product of labour. It is a serious disincentive to them. And it seems, had there been any alternative to meet their rice consumption need, they would perhaps not go for boro cultivation on a scale they do.
To ensure that farmers might get due returns from their crop, it is hoped that the government would take its decision early with an eye to the harvesting time of boro. Power for irrigation has to be regular and cost of other inputs has to be kept within affordable limits. Last, but not the least, government should take some steps to protect farmers from the clutches of faria (middlemen) class.
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