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Indian oil palm farmers across three southern states have voiced strong opposition to the central government's recent decision to slash the basic import duty on palm oil from 10 percent to 5 percent, warning that the move threatens the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of domestic growers.
The National Oil Palm Farmers Association (NOFA) and the state oil palm farmers' welfare associations of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka said the duty reduction would expose lakhs of farmers to aggressive competition from cheaper imported palm oil, undermining the viability of domestic cultivation.
NOFA General Secretary Kranthi Kumar Reddy and the Andhra Pradesh Oil Palm Farmers Welfare Association President Bobba Veera Raghav Rao said the government's policy framework is tilted in favour of the refining industry, while the concerns of cultivators have been consistently overlooked.
The associations pointed to the growing disparity between duties on crude and refined palm oil. The gap, which stood at 7.5 percent in 2019-20, has now widened to 24.75 percent, they noted. 'This bias towards refiners is unacceptable. If consumer interests are to be protected, the gap must be narrowed to 5 percent, as it was a decade ago,' the farmer leaders said.
During a recent visit to Hyderabad by Union Agriculture Minister Shivaraj Singh Chouhan, the agriculture ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana had jointly urged the Centre to raise the import duty and fix a minimum support price of ₹25,000 per tonne of fresh fruit bunches (FFBs), citing the sharp rise in cultivation costs.
Kranthi Reddy and Veera Raghav Rao appealed to the government to restore the import duty to the 2021-22 level of 49 percent in order to safeguard the interests of domestic producers. They also criticised the commerce ministry for unilaterally fixing duty rates without consulting the agriculture ministry, despite the direct impact of such decisions on farming communities.
Source: Deccan Chronicle