APMC strike threat: Government may stand ground

Traders and agents of Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC) in Maharashtra have threatened an indefinite strike from July 18, in protest against the proposal to delist vegetables and fruits from the purview of the APMC. That is just before the Maharashtra Cabinet comes out with ordinance on the Bill.The government is not expected to go back on its reforms as unless there are changes and in the right direction Maharashtra may not get access to national agriculture mission which enables trade on a national level. The mandis in India have been working in multilayered structure but now is the time to get it out into the open.As per the motion passed in Maharashtra Cabinet last week, the farmers can now sell their produce outside APMC markets. Under the APMC rule, the farmers until now were bound to sell only via traders licensed by the APMC at the price decided by them. In addition to this the farmer has to pay fixed charges like the Cess, APMC taxes and the commission to the trader too. And by the time the produce reaches you, there also are margins from middlemen, logistics and storage charges, creating the big divide between the farm prices and the retail prices. The latest incident was of tomatoes where the retail market shot up to Rs 80, even as the farm prices was prevailing at Rs 20/Kg.The delisting will remove the monopoly of the local traders and bring in more competition as other traders can now enter into the space, which will be profitable for the farmers. There are 30 odd regulated market places that Maharashtra has and more than 300 farm trading.The delisting would mean that a Vashi trader can now buy produce from a Nashik farmer or a bulk buyer can now strike a deal with the farmer directly. The traders and commission agents are not just protesting delisting, they have also demanded a way out. If the farmers are free to sell the produce to anyone then the traders want to be freed of any similar rules. Delisting is a structural move; the change will take a long time to create an impact. It will not change the way business is done immediately but it is a move in the right direction. The other states that have allowed farmers to sell out of APMC are Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Delhi, Haryana and West Bengal. And while some of these markets have delisted an year and more ago, there is no exact statistics on how much business did move out of the APMC’ as almost all of it is done in cash. That would be the next step that the Central Government has been talking about getting a change in on the way the dealings are done.