NEW DELHI: India’s agriculture exports strategy is being reworked with greater focus on products whose trade is not regulated.
The government has identified 20 farm products whose global imports are over $ 405 billion for focussed push in the coming years, official sources said. India’s share in the world exports of these 20 products – which largely comprises fruits, alcoholic beverages, meat and products derived from milk and cereals – is $9.03 billion or just 2.23 %.
According to Agriculture Processed Food Export Development Authority (APEDA) the unrealised export potential of these products is $56.7 billion. “We are working on a detailed strategy on each of these products. Maybe in the next three to four months we will have a strategy,” additional secretary in the department of commerce Rajesh Agarwal said.
The strategy will lay down an action plan for next five years to get 10% of the world trade in the 20 shortlisted products. A detailed strategy for each product will be drawn up which will identify what APEDA needs to do. It will also involve state governments and the ministry of agriculture to identify clusters of production that the government needs to focus on.
“We are having sectoral meetings with the exporters and producers trying to understand the constraints and build a strategy over the next few months so that we are able to work in a focussed manner,” he said. The focus on non-regulated agriculture products has been necessitated because frequent export restrictions on agriculture commodities that are essential for domestic food security lead to sharp decline in overseas earnings from the sector in some years. Within regulated sectors that include wheat, rice, sugar and onions only the surplus will be exported.
“Our focus will be to look at export promotion in areas which are outside the regulatory domain. In the regulatory domain our work will be more focussed on ensuring that any exportable surplus we produce gets connected to the global markets. If there is surplus then only we will export,” Agarwal said.
“There is an opportunity and this will enable more sustained growth of agriculture exports otherwise we will see more up and down in agriculture exports.”
The ban on exports of wheat, rice, sugar and onions has led to a decline in agriculture exports in April-February 2023-24 to 8.8% to $ 43.7 billion. “We have dipped by 3 billion. Our main impact has come from regulated commodities where our fall has been 5-6 billion dollars,” he said.
India did not export wheat, broken rice, or sugar, reduced exports of non-basmati rice and onions.
The data also showed that exports of the 719 scheduled agri products in the APEDA basket declined by 6.85 per cent to $ 22.4 billion during the 11-month period. Out of 24 principal commodities in APEDA basket, 17 have recorded positive growth during the period and that included fresh fruit, buffalo meat, processed vegetables, basmati rice and banana.
The exports of basmati rice have increased 22% on year to $5.2 billion during the period.
On whether the recent escalation of conflict in the Middle East between Iran and Israel has impacted agriculture exports, Agarwal said, “prima facie we have not seen much on the ground that is impacting the trade. We have not heard much from shipping lines. We assume things are carrying on.”
“If there are major push backs it will come to us also. Probably there are not many push backs. It will depend on how it evolves with time. It is an externality which we cannot predict but we are monitoring.”
Source: The Financial Express