Policies towards Warehousing & Marketing

Dr Murari Lal Gaur

The warehousing and marketing facilities have important linkages that help farmers and traders gain from agricultural trade, where storage use to be an extremely vital function for success deciding success of agricultural marketing. It involves holding and preserving of agricultural commodities from the time they are produced until they are needed for consumption. Looking into prevailing socio economic scenario of Indian farmers there exists an inevitable need to provide the farming community with facilities for scientific storage, so that wastage and produce deterioration are avoided and also to enable it to meet its credit requirement without being compelled to sell the produce at a time when the prices are low. An improved policy framework accommodating modern infrastructure and smart management tools & techniques like IT, ICT , and e-trading may help in reduction of wastage and better marketing and will enable small & marginal farmers to enhance their holding capacity in order to sell their produce at remunerative prices and avoid distress sales.

Agricultural activities in India are largely carried out by small and marginal farmers, where exists about 121 million operational holdings, over 80 % of which comprise marginal and small holdings (< 2 ha). There subsist variety of marketing services & facilities in the sectors of R&D, Extension, and other market intelligence services by Government sector, but in real sense they are inadequate having ample scope of their improvements to facilitate farmers, farming, farm produce, farm income, and ultimately the farming economy. Often the farmers under Indian conditions need a timely credit, where in majority of cases their credit needs include personal loans. Such ccredit is habitually provided by the trader (informal money lending system) either by