It was kind of surprising for me to come across the news that India, one of the leading producers and exporter of sugar is going to import sugar for the first time. Well I was wondering what possibly can go wrong. The major producers of sugar in India are Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. This year the sugar output in Maharashtra may drop 44 percent to 5.13 million tons in the year to Sept. 30, while production in Uttar Pradesh, the second-largest, may fall 37 percent to 4.6 million tons[bloomberg]. I know this problem is never going to improve and is just going to worsen with time. With the coming of so many food processing industries the industrial consumption of sugar has gone up till now and will only worsen with the coming years.
I knew this would have happened as it is one of the predicted aspects of agriculture. Agriculture is just not about "you reap what you sow" anymore. I know this first hand because this year alone the farmers big or small had grown so much of potato in and around Uttar Pradesh, that the net output of the country went really up and ultimately all the cold storage in and around the potato growing area were overstocked. The crop this year was so exceptional in quantity that a majority of farmers had to discard their crop as the market rate of potatoes crashed due to overproduction. You might think why would someone throw away there bumper crop. Well the reason being, the transportation cost is so high that it is profitable for the farmer to throw away the crop than transport it to the markets(the market rate of potato in 2008-09 was already very low). The outcome of this bumper crop in this unorganized agriculture was that a lot of farmers committed suicide(a small farmer is just reliant on his current crop and he is already in debt which he might have paid if his current crop gave returns).
So what exactly is the role of the Indian government and why aren't they able to stop all this? The only places government intervenes is when the crop is produced and they have to set market selling rates for the different crops so that the commodity market and the consumer is not hurt with the inflated prices of some crop. The person who works hardest in the process to put food on out table is the one who gets hurt in this faulty system.
What should the government do?
We have to organize the Indian agriculture. but how?..
The agriculture dept should conduct surveys and figure out what crop will grow the best in which belt and alot the farmers with an option to grow from a selection of short listed crop. The entire idea is that the government shoud know what amout of a specific crop is grown by a paticular farmer and in what quantity.This way we will have an estimate of the total output from a belt, a region and looking at a big picture the total expected output from the country. This process will not show results in just one go but the government and the farmers will have to work together until they perfect it.
Coming back to the Sugar problem!!
Currently the government pays a 70% subsidy to any food processing company putting up a plant which has anything to do with a cold storage or a cold facility to improve on the cold chain/cold storage network of the county as a whole. With this provision we have seen a number of small time cold beverage(sugar needed in excess) manufacturers and sugar consuming plants come up. The industrial consumption went really up and with the unorganized agriculture we ended up importing sugar for the first time.
The solution to this problem is, adopting a new kind of safe sugar called "HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP" (HFCS). This is processed form of sugar derived from the starch obtained from corn and processed to give a sugar product equivalent and sometimes better in sweetness than sugar according to the grade of HFCS. HFCS is being used in the United States since 80's and is one of the popular form of sugar one might find in all the processed food. It is completely safe to use what one must know is the right quantity to add to their packaged beverage.
The results:
- organization of Indian agriculture with better control over prices in the long run.
- HFCS will take over sugar at industrial level.
- With surplus sugar we can export it to countries around the world and gain foreign exchange.
