Low Pesticide Residue & Sweeter Taste: Meghalaya Pineapples Apt Product For International Markets

The Department of Agriculture and Farmers¡¯ Welfare, Government of Meghalaya and Meghalaya Basin Management Agency (MBMA) had recently facilitated market linkages of over 1.3 tonnes of Pineapples to the Middle East.

Representative image/ BCCL

This comes after the successful export of Khasi mandarin last year, when two tones of the GI-tagged fruit were exported to Doha and Bahrain.

The government is also planning to organise a Pineapple festival in Delhi post the celebrations of Independence Day, for promotion of the fruit within the country.

Reduce gulf between state farmers & international markets

The pineapples from Meghalaya are being sold across malls in Dubai, Kuwait and Sharjah. Further, farmers are also experiencing upto two times increase in price realisation from these trades.

Such efforts by government are part of the continued efforts to reduce the gulf between the farmers of the state and lucrative international markets.

Last year, over 40 tonnes of pineapples were shipped to a Karnataka-based processor to be further exported to European and North American markets, East Mojo reported.

Low pesticide residue in Meghalaya pineapples

The Meghalaya pineapples are mostly cultivated without any use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, resulting in a significantly lower heavy metal and pesticide residue in the fruit.

Pineapple orchard/ BCCL

These pineapples are popular for their high-sugar content (brix value of 16-18) and low sourness.

This makes it highly suitable for export to lucrative international and national markets.

Link with local retailers also sought

During harvest season, entire pineapple fields are harvested for sale, but only the large pineapples (Grade A) get sold to the processing units.

This is because the processing units do not accept fruits of smaller sizes and require pineapples weighing a kilogram and above.

As a result, farmers are left behind with smaller-sized pineapples (Grade B aka table variety). As ripening accelerates post-harvest, farmers are forced to engage in distress sale and sell them at throwaway prices.

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To mitigate this, the Department of Agriculture and Farmers¡¯ Welfare is actively exploring market linkages with local retailers and has recently established linkages with Reliance Retail stores across Guwahati for the sale of table-variety pineapples from Meghalaya.

Efforts to remove middlemen & focus on community-centric solutions

An East Mojo report states that pineapple trade in Meghalaya has been long dominated by middlemen who often book pineapple farms months before harvest season by paying the farmers a lump sum amount.

While this meets the short term needs of the farmer, but what they don't realise is that they are actually booking their farms at a fraction of the cost of the fruits on their farm.

To tackle this, the government has been actively working towards building community-centric, grassroots-level solutions. This includes mobilising the farmers to form farmer cooperatives and farmer producer organisations (FPOs) across the state.

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