The central government is preparing a draft note to modify the Agricultural Produce Marketing cooperative Act (APMC) for freeing the sale of fruits and vegetables from its ambit and deregulate their trading and marketing.
This follows the decision made by the government to deregulate trading of fruits and vegetables and in the process slash the taxes and other charges paid while bringing the produce from farm gate to the consumers. According to official sources, the APMC Act already has provisions and thus enables the states for segregating these items without any amendment to the statute which could have been done long back when the prices were ruling very high for most part of the year. Since no action was taken by the states, now the central government is preparing guidelines as to what are the options for deregulating the trading of fruits and vegetables. While this is likely to contain rise of prices, following good monsoon and healthy agricultural produce, prices of many commodities are already on a way down. It is expected prices of most of the fruits and vegetables are expected to fall down further in the coming days.
As per the note, the central government has specifically directed 12 congress party ruled states two options for this. One is to completely deregulate the trading and marketing of fruits and vegetables including potatoes and onion both outside and indie the APMC market yard. The states could do this without any amendment in the Act and are empowered as per the Act itself to add or delete any agricultural commodities regulated under the APMC Act any time from the schedule just by a notification.
However, the central government is not in favour of complete deregulation of the trading of such commodities as the sellers of fruits and vegetables will lose their captive market which they have built over years inside the APMC yard. On the other hand, they will incur extra costs in building separate market outside the APMC yard. This is because once taken out of the APMC Act, the fruits and vegetables sellers cannot trade inside the APMC market yard without license and thus lose their captive market built over years, explained an official source.
The second option is to partially deregulate trading of the fruits and vegetables so that they could be sold inside the APMC Act under the regulation of the4 APMC Act. Simultaneously, outside the regulation of the APMC Act, these farmers could sell the produce outside the APMC market yard and create new markets. Thus they get to serve the captive markets as well as the make direct selling points outside the AMC market yard with the consumers. However this could require either an amendment of the e APMC act or an ordinance by the states. Official sources said, this could serve in the best interest of the farmers. This way they get to sell inside the APMC market yard with license from and under the regulation of the APMC and outside the AMPC market without any regulation or APMC license.
