The Food Corporation of India (FCI) is deliberating strong quality controls and are proposing revision of specifications for food grains procurement. However, farmer leaders are questioning these norms with the harvest less than a month away.

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However, Agri Economist Devinder Sharma said that it would be difficult to implement these norms from April 1 when the official procurement begins. He said that the farmers will not have any time to take steps to ensure that the quality norms are adhered to.

“It will be very tough for FCI to implement these norms from April 1. The government should have taken notice of the protest that is going on and government should have also seen the timing. There is already a trust deficit and with these kinds of quality norms being introduced, that trust deficit only widens. This is not a healthy sign for either agriculture or the farming community or for the government to look forward to a situation where the food procurement goes up,” he said in an interview to CNBC-TV18.

According to Sharma, FCI must first clean up its own act and ensure that they themselves adhere to the quality norms.

“The stocks are lying in the open in the FCI godown. The quality norms get worsened when the stocks are in storage with the FCI. The first emphasis should have been to clean up the FCI’s act because at that particular stage the food rots and we have seen pictures of rats eating the stocks and so on. So, this I think is the first and paramount initiative that the government should have taken to see how FCI can improve its working because after all the food stock that it is claiming has to be exported, has to exported from the FCI stock. So, the first and foremost step should have been to really make FCI adhere to the quality norms,” he said.

He said that some quality standards are beyond the farmers control and hence they must be given some incentive in order to adhere to the norms.

“It is important to understand that there are quality standards which are not in the control of farmers. They try to clean up before they bring their produce to the mandis, but if you look at the status of mandis, the government is withdrawing the mandi tax which means that the upkeep of mandi would receive less attention in the days to come. So on the one hand the government is trying to make APMC mandis redundant because when there is no money to manage the mandis, how do you expect quality standards to be taken care of. So, there has to be some kind of incentive given to farmers to adhere to those quality norms,” he said.

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(Edited by : Aditi Gautam)

First Published:Mar 15, 2021 5:37 PM IST