Together with enhancing production and productivity, Government`s priority has been to take various measures to improve marketing of agricultural produce to ensure remunerative prices for farmers’ produce. Though, it is a State subject, yet Government promotes development of farmers’ accessible competitive markets like direct marketing, private markets, etc through reforms, in State governments’ Marketing Laws and policies. To further improve agricultural marketing, Government in 2016 launched a National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) to enable the farmers to transparently sell their produce to large number of buyers accessing multiple markets electronically. In addition, to address the marketing challenges of farmers, specially of small and marginal ones, Government took measure in 2020 by launching a market linkage approached based “Formation and Promotion of 10,000 Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) scheme.

Government is also implementing a Central Sector Scheme, Agriculture Infrastructure Fund (AIF) of Rs. 1,00,000 Crore to provide a medium-long term loan facility for investment in viable projects for post-harvest market infrastructure including warehousing facility and community farming assets through interest subvention and financial support. Apart from above, The Government is implementing Agricultural Marketing Infrastructure (AMI), a sub-scheme of Integrated Scheme for Agricultural Marketing (ISAM) under which assistance is provided for construction of godowns/warehouses in the rural areas in the States to enhance the storage capacity for agriculture produce. Under the scheme, Government provides subsidy at the rate of 25% and 33.33% on capital cost of the project based on the category of eligible beneficiary.

Government measures have resulted into:

1. establishment of more than 120 private markets in the country, giving competing alternative  marketing  channel to the farmers to ensure remunerative prices for their produce;
2. licensing of large number of  direct marketers (processors, exporters,  organized retailers, etc) to purchase the produce directly from farm-gate outside  the Agricultural Produce Market  Committee (APMC) market-yards to better monetize  farmers’ produce; 
3. enabling farmers to digitally access large number of buyers and markets to get best discovered price.
4. enabling farmers’ in the form of FPOs to access e-markets, futures market, export market in addition to  benefits of collective bargaining  power and sale of  value added products .

 Government takes need based steps to improve the value chain and to provide remunerate prices to the farmers.

 This information was given by the Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, Shri Kailash Choudhary in a written reply in Rajya Sabha today.

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