Bharatiya Janata Party national spokesman G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, member of Rajya Sabha, on Monday assured the worried tobacco growers of using his good offices with the Centre to restore buoyancy in the market as it was triple whammy for the growers due to low productivity, poor grade out-turn and infestation of parasitic weed orobanche cernua this year.
Better price promised
After touring tobacco growing areas in Ongole and Tangutur in Prakasam district to know the ground realities, he also promised to impress upon the traders to purchase low grade varieties offering a better price.
“I will sit with the traders and officials of the Tobacco Board to arrive at a solution for the problems faced by farmers,” he said
Pouring out their woes, a group of farmers at Tangutur said there were no takers for low grade varieties as also greens as domestic cigarette manufacturers drove down the prices of these varieties, while the exporters shied away from the market on the pretext that they had not yet got confirmed orders from importers yet.
At the beginning of auctions, the buyers promised to purchase low grade varieties at a price not less than ₹100 per kg.
But the prices of these varieties, which accounted for more than 50% of the estimated crop of over 80 million kg in Southern Black Soil and Southern Light Soil (SLS) regions, had dipped below ₹90 per kg.
In this situation, they would not be able to break even leave alone making some profit, said SBS Farmers’ Association president Pothula Narasimha Rao.
Referring to the 2014-15 marketing season when the Union and State governments announced a bonus price for low grade varieties in the wake of six tobacco growers taking the extreme step of ending their lives, Ongole II Auction Platform Farmers’ Association president V.V. Prasad said a similar gesture from the two governments was the need of the hour to prevent farmer suicide now.
Foreign exchange
Federation of All India Farmer Association (FAIFA) K. Vasudeva Rao wanted the BJP Rajya Sabha member to impress upon the Centre to protect the livelihood of 4.7 crore farmers, farm labour, and their families depend upon the tobacco sector which earned the nation over ₹6,000 crore foreign exchange.
He also wanted the Centre to rationalise taxes on cigarettes as it led to smuggling of 25 billion sticks.
“The smuggled cigarettes do not use Indian tobacco and because of which the off-take of FCV tobacco has dropped by 31%, 316 million kg in 2013-14 to 240 million kgs in 2017-18, due to loss of volume of legal cigarette industry.
Drop in earnings
This has resulted in drop in earnings of tobacco farmers, which have shrunk cumulatively by more than ₹4000 crore in the last four years. This is not only affecting the livelihood of tobacco farmers but also causing substantial revenue loss to the government, estimated at more than ₹13,000 crore per annum,” he explained.