Goa may not achieve target of doubling farm income by March 2022

ROQUE DIAS | NT

Margao: With the state government doing little to double the income of farmers and with focus in the next four months likely to be on state assembly election and its preparations, Goa is likely to miss the countrywide target of March 2022 set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi five years back for the initiative.

Decline in community farming across the country and the shift of workers and cultivators from the agriculture sector has been a cause for concern and to address this, the Prime Minister had set a vision to double farmers’ income. An announcement related to this was made in 2016.

As a strategy document for doubling farmers’ income across the country, experts from the National Institute of Agricultural Economics and Policy Research, Delhi, had prepared a policy paper to guide the state governments tap various resources to realise the dream.

However, Goa’s agriculture department has failed miserably to make impressive and effective changes in the state’s agriculture sector in the last five years. Though some schemes and financial assistance may have reached some cultivators in the state, there has, however, been no time-bound planning and strategy on how to double the income of farmers of this small touristic state.

Goa has seen a decline in the paddy crop and areas under its cultivation in the last five years and the official figures presented recently by the government in the state legislative assembly is a testimony to this. Goa presently has 32,677 hectares of land under paddy cultivation as against 41,344 hectares in 2015-16. Interestingly, lakhs of square metres of agricultural land has been acquired by the government in the last five years for various public utility projects and the land kept fallow in many cases.

Under the initiative to double farmers’ income, the Centre had constituted an 11-member Goa state coordination committee, which held its first meeting in 2017 and later prepared the strategy document for Goa, highlighting the major constraints and roadblocks farmers faced. However, the committee failed to meet regularly and the constraints listed in the document remained unaddressed despite the fact that solution to each of these constraints was provided in the strategy document.

Moreover, the state’s agriculture department lacks the much-required agriculture policy. The draft agriculture policy is yet to be finalised by a committee. The agriculture department also has no data collected on farmers and their activities or a survey of the agricultural land under cultivation with or without the integrated crops in Goa even though these two factors are highly important to plan for the doubling of farmers’ income.

Chief Minister Pramod Sawant had stated on December 2, 2020 that his government had worked out a roadmap and was focussing on promoting an integrated farming system for achieving the goal of doubling farmers’ income by March 2022 so as to make the state self-reliant in agricultural produce. However, a year later, nothing much has happened on the ground and Goa continues to depend on the neighbouring states for agricultural commodities, dairy products, meat and other items to meet its demand.

The Chief Minister had also assured to form Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) in every taluka with a minimum of 100 farmers as members almost a year back, but till date, the FPOs have not been formed. According to sources, the government has given the responsibility to the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).

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