Low rate forces farmers to cross border to sell paddy

CHAMPARAN, NOV 30: For the past one month, every other night, a tractor laden with sacks of paddy winds its way through the dusty tracks a...

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CHAMPARAN, NOV 30: For the past one month, every other night, a tractor laden with sacks of paddy winds its way through the dusty tracks along the border villages inEast Champaran district and enters Nepal. With domestic paddy prices crashing in the state, a surplus crop and no procurement, farmers are travelling to Nepal in the hope of breaking even.

While ministers debate the issue in Parliament and the Bihar State Cooperatives Ministry starts a campaign for the procurement of paddy today, in the border village of Rampur, Harishankar Prasad surveys his stacks of crop in despair. “I had a good crop this year,” he whispers, adding: “but the prices are so low that I am not even going to break even. The bicholi (middleman) I sell my produce to will make marginal profits in Nepal, where the demand for paddy is more.”

A few kilometres away, in Peerahi village, Rajendra Ran is facing a similar problem. “Around 200 rice mills have come up on the other side of the border,” Ran informs, adding: “And they have become our market. We manage to break even after selling our paddy to them. I was told that the milled paddy travels further north into China.”

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Hoping to get at least Rs 400 per quintal, both Prasad and Ran were forced to sell the first lot of their fine quality paddy for just Rs 100 per quintal. The going rate across the border is Rs 200 per quintal, which is double of the domestic rates. And if the government procurement machinery were functional, both would have been assured a price of Rs 510 per quintal for common paddy.

Overflowing Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns triggered off the immediate crisis. Aware that selling paddy to the state was going to be impossible, traders are buying paddy at low rates. The FCI, in turn, is not procuring any paddy. Between October last year and September this year, the regional branch of the FCI procured 21,000 tonnes of rice but did not pick up any paddy.

Regional director of FCI Abdul Rab explains: “In 1997-98, we had picked up around 25 thousand tonnes of paddy. We sold the entire paddy two years later because we did not find millers who would convert the paddy into rice. Mill owners prefer buying paddy directly from farmers at lower rates. Also, at present all our depots are choked. There have been no transactions for quite sometime. All these factors have contributed to the present situation.”

Further, floods have damaged the crop in one of the biggest rice-producing belts in the state. As a result, the harvest of farmers in the state is not meeting the required standards of the FCI. While Punjab woke up to the crisis early and made sure the government purchased the produce, the Bihar government has been shooting off letters to the Central Government only in the last 10 days.

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Responding to the request of Chief Minister Rabri Devi to lower the standards a bit, a Central team is arriving in Patna this evening to collect samples of the paddy affected by floods. A final decision on the cost will be taken based on the report of the Central Grain Analysis Centre.

Meanwhile, Cooperatives Minister Veena Shahi has launched a campaign to procure paddy through different primary agriculture cooperative societies and marketing boards. Blaming the “declining prices and FCI indifference” to the plight of the farmers, Shahi said that the government now had no choice but to buy the paddy from farmers.