-This is a 22-fold increase in area from the existing 36,421 hectares of land under palm oil cultivation.

-The state government supports farmers from farm to market, thus, assuring income with palm oil plantation.

-However, the inclination toward palm oil cultivation comes with many challenges such as low benefit for small and marginal farmers, dependence on groundwater and long gestation period. Globally too there are concerns about the environmental impacts of oil palm monoculture.

By Manish Kumar

On a cool, mid-November evening, Vidya Sagar, a 56-year-old farmer, was rushing from one corner of his 3.2-hectare oil palm field to another, hurriedly gathering fresh fruit from the trees before the sun sets. Sagar is a resident of Khammam district’s Medepally village in the state of Telangana. He plans to expand the oil palm plantation on the remaining 1.2 hectares of his land, given that the government is incentivising the crop.

“There is no reason to think otherwise,” he says, listing many benefits the state government offers for oil palm cultivation: an assured procurement of all his produce, free electricity which makes irrigation cost-free and subsidised seedlings provided by oil processing firms.

“Oil palm (from which palm oil is derived) cultivation has proved very profitable for the farmers for several reasons. First, there is huge government support to grow the crop. There is little risk of monkey and wild boar attacks on these crops. Oil palm trees can withstand harsh weather conditions, and there is far less labour involved in growing them,” Sagar tells Mongabay-India while working on his oil palm field.

Another farmer, 62-year-old Hariprasad S. from the same village, adds to the ongoing conversation. He has converted four hectares of his mango farm to an oil palm farm. The reason, he says, was the assured procurement of all his produce by these oil processing firms.

He shows his diary in which he has written the rates at which he sold his fresh fruit at the nearby Sathupally oil processing unit in Khammam, over the last one year. The best price he got in the last six months was around Rs. 13,000 per tonne. Usually, he is able to pick and sell oil palm fruits about twice a month. He claims that if these rates continue, he could earn around Rs. 3.32 lakh (Rs. 332,000) annually, from each acre (o.4 hectares), which would mean an annual income of almost Rs. 33.2 lakh (Rs. 3.32 million) from his four-hectare land.

In Medepally village, where Sagar and Hariprasad are from, at least a dozen farmers are into oil palm farming. Many of them opted for cultivating this crop, more than 30 years ago. Vidya Sagar is one among them.

“Currently, there are 23,000 farmers in Telangana who are into oil palm cultivation. We have around 36,421 hectares under oil palm cultivation, out of which 16,187 hectares are fruit-bearing fields,” informed an official from the state horticulture department, requesting anonymity.

Telangana’s oil palm farmers see their fortune growing with the country’s increasing consumption of palm oil, which is derived from the oil palm fruit.

Palm oil is a widespread component of products in the Indian market – from daily use products like soaps and toothpastes to edible products like biscuits, cooking oil, chocolates and more. Globally though, the use of palm oil is controversial as the supply chain is usually riddled with environmental issues.

India consumes more than nine million metric tonnes of palm oil annually and its edible oil import bills are in trillions of rupees. India is the world’s largest importer of palm oil. It needs to import this oil to meet the gap of 61.80 percent between the total domestic demand and the local production.

India and other palm oil consuming countries depend heavily on producer countries in Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia and Malaysia for imports. However, the environmental impact of large-scale oil palm cultivation in these geographies is of concern, globally as the regions continue to be associated with deforestation and peatland destruction for oil palm cultivation.

To ease the burden of the treasury and lower the dependence on imports, the union government is on a mission to expand the cultivation of oil palm across the country under its ambitious National Mission on Edible Oils-Oil Palm (NMEO-OP) programme. It aims to increase the area of oil palm to 10 lakh (one million) hectares by 2025-26, up from 3.5 lakh (350,000) hectares in 2019-20. Telangana sees a share for itself in this pie.