With No Takers For Their Crops Due To Lockdown, Farmers Are Forced To Throw Them, Feed To Cows

The ongoing 21-day nationwide lockdown is having a disastrous impact on the country's agriculture sector. Though trucks carrying essential supplies including vegetables and fruits are exempted from the lockdown, the ground reality is that they find it difficult to operate and many wholesalers have stopped buying farm products.

The sudden move has hit farmers producing short-shelf lived items like strawberries and broccoli.

¡°Tourists and ice cream producers are the main buyers of strawberries, but there are no tourists now,¡± said Anil Salunkhe, while feeding strawberries are grown in his two-acre farm to his cows in Satara district of Maharashtra.

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Strawberry and carrot growers in Kerala's Munnar are also facing problems in selling their produce due to the lockdown. "Strawberry is mostly sold in retail markets that are shut due to lockdown," said Arul Mani, a farmer.

Munishamappa, a farmer near India¡¯s IT hub of Bengaluru, dumped 15 tonnes of grapes in a nearby forest after failing to sell them - he had spent 5,00,000 rupees on his crop. He had even asked nearby villagers to come to collect his fruit for free, but few turned up, he said.

Indian grapes are also exported to Europe, which has sharply cut purchases in the past few weeks as the virus takes a heavy toll there, said Dyanesh Ugle of Sahyadri Farms, the country¡¯s biggest grape exporter.

BCCL

Growers of expensive flowers such as gerbera, gladioli, and bird of paradise, meanwhile, are worried after weddings that typically generate the bulk of demand have gotten cancelled.

¡°In summer, I sell one flower for 15 to 20 rupees. Now nobody is willing to buy even at 1 rupee,¡± said Rahul Pawar, who owns a 2-acre flower farm, as he plucked flowers to dump them into a compost pit. Ajay Jadhav, who relies on upmarket restaurants to sell basil, iceberg lettuce and bok-choy grown on his three acres, said his fellow villagers won¡¯t take away the vegetables even for free.

¡°I don¡¯t have a choice but to make manure out of these exotic vegetables,¡± he said. ¡°Rural folks don¡¯t even know the names of these vegetables. Forget about them cooking these.¡±

BCCL

Dairy farmers in Kerala are also facing a tough time due to the breakdown of the supply chain. On Wednesday, farmers poured some 80,000 litres of milk on the ground in Palakkad district after Milma, a state-owned milk products company stopped procurement due to the lockdown.