As per the Third Advance Estimates food grain production in the country has increased to 273 MT in 2016-17, oil seeds to 32.5 MT, and sugarcane to 306 MT.
Fruits & Vegetable production has increased to 287 MTs, according to the Second Advance Estimate.
According to Union Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister Radha Mohan Singh there has been a record production of food grains in 2016-17 and all previous records were broken.
Union government has set a target of doubling farmers’ income by 2022. Farmers have not been getting the corresponding increase in remuneration. The Government is seized of the urgent requirement of strengthening market systems to reduce post-harvest losses to enable farmers to tide over both situations of bumper production leading to a glut and abrupt price fall and incidences of less production resulting in the availability of meagre marketable surplus.
The approach adopted by government encompasses both adoptions of cost effective production and diversifying agriculture towards growing of high-value crops, agroforestry, rearing of livestock, poultry, fisheries, etc, as well as creating accessible and efficient markets to ensure better price realisation to the farmers through a robust value supply chain.
In order to address the constraints of present agricultural marketing system promoted by APMCs and assure accessible marketing facilities to farmers, the Government has shared a corrective reform with the States and we have been able to move faster on this front in the last 2-3 years since the circulation of model APMC Act, 2003 to the States.
The model Agriculture Produce and Livestock Marketing (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2017 was released to the States on April 24, 2017, and has received a positive response regarding its adoption from all States.
