Good, on paper

Govt's moves on farm marketing are difficult to implement

The series of initiatives taken by the government to mitigate farmers’ marketing-related woes in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic looks good on paper. The most notable among these moves include asking the states to restrict the jurisdiction of the mandis run by the agricultural produce marketing committees (APMCs) to their physical premises for three months and declare warehouses as deemed agricultural markets. It has also mooted permitting Farmers’ Producer Organisations (FPOs) to trade directly through the electronic National Agricultural Market (e-NAM) without taking the stocks to the market yards. The underlying objectives of these measures, quite obviously, are to