From Rs 2,960 per quintal last week, coconut oil has closed on Rs 2,851 per quintal this week. In last October, a quintal of oil had fetched up to Rs 6,000 in Kochi market. This year, there was no Diwali-season-high. There is not even a halt to the price fall, in spite of the elaborate anti-palmoil protests that gathered momentum from North Kerala.

While the coconut farmers in Malabar had grabbed attention by emptying gallons of palm oil on the street and their Kochi brethren by setting the imported oil afire, Hotel and Restaurant Association of Kerala had come out with a proposals of eateries within the State boycotting palmoil and welcoming coconut products.

Vying with the Hotel and Restaurant Association's suggestion to include tender coconut delicacies in the restaurant menu, a whole hosts of panchayats has offered to set up `Ilaneer pandals' serving tender coconut water, thus improving the overall domestic demand for coconut products.

However, with the hooch tragedy in South Kerala involving 35 deaths coming to light, the palmoil dumping woes of the farmers have been firmly pushed back from media headlines. The anti-palmoil campaign , intended to perk up the pre-Diwali coconut oil demand had proved a damp squib, an office-bearer of a farmers' organisation told The Financial Express. At best, it has served to minimise the fall in prices.

Meanwhile, Union Textiles Minister Dhananjaya Kumar has, at a function in Palakkad, blamed Kerafed , the Nafed's procurement agency for the failure of the procurment programme. According to sources in Cochin Oil Merchants' Association (COMA), the flushing out of 85,000 tonnes coconut oil procured by Nafed into the Mumbai, Baroda markets is likely to aggravate the price situation.

To supplement their plea with the Central Agricultural Pricing Committee Chairman Abhijit Sen to determine the prices of coconut in relation to the unit productivity of land, farmer organisations in Kerala have now joined hands with coconut farmers in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu also.

The coconut farmers of South India have jointly submitted a memorandum to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, seeking a clamp on the discriminate import of agricultural commodities.

According to the memorandum, the South Indian farmers are facing great difficulties because of the steep fall in the prices of coconut oil as a result of the increase in the import of edible oils like palmoil. The prices of copra, which were about Rs 45 per kig in 1991, had dropped to nearly Rs 15 per kg now.

The trade liberalisation policies have also adversely affected all the important cash crops like rubber, betel, coffee, tea, cocoa and cardamom.

While prices of rubber have fallen from Rs 65 per kg in 1991 to Rs 30 now, those of coffee fell from Rs 90 to Rs 30, cardomom from Rs 800 to Rs 300, cocoa from Rs 75 to Rs 15, tea (tender leaves) from Rs 10 to Rs 3 and betel from Rs 165 to Rs 60.

On the other hand, the prices of agricultural inputs like fertilisers, farm implements, kerosene, electricity and pesticides have doubled during the period, the memorandum has pointed out.