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OUR BUREAU
Mumbai, Sept 20: The cabinet committee at the centre will come out with a package of incentives in a week's time to promote the farmers in cultivating more crops especially pulses and oilseeds where the country has to heavily depend on imports, disclosed minister of state for food and consumer affairs, Satyapal Singh Yadav.
He was addressing 27th annual general meeting of the country's premier organisation The Solvent Extractors' Association of India (SEA) at Mumbai on September 19. RP Sinha, secretary (sugar & oilseeds) pressed the need for further exploitation of edible rice-bran oil in his address. He also appealed the solvent extraction industry to take a lead in collection of 70 per cent of oilcakes bearing high oil content from being fed to the cattle. Stagnated yield and cultivation of oilseeds, poor capacity utilisation, infrastructure bottlenecks, reduced oilmeals exports, differential tax-structure among the various states and issue of oilseeds import will be the major topics of the discussion atthe meeting.
The industry is saddled with various problems ranging from low oilseeds availability to poor export performance of oilmeals and price realisation and mass cancellation of Indian soyabean meal supply orders. According to the re-elected president of the association Ajay Tandon, only salvage package from the government could help revive the industry. Increase in raw material i.e. oilseeds supply is crucial at this juncture. Since there has been no major improvement in the yield or overall production of oilseeds in the country, the only way out of it is permission to import oilseeds that would make units viable. The association pursued the government to also allow import of high oil content seeds like rapeseed, sunflowerseed, rice bran and oilcakes to augment the supply of raw material to the industry.
A package of measures, including no permission from the government to set up new units, rescheduling of loans and waiver of penal interest as well as lenient views on payments of statutory duesare the need of the hour, he added.
Certain steps like provision of deferred credit and creation of an export market development fund would help oilmeals export revive.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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