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Brewing a plan for coffee
The Union minister of state for commerce Jairam Ramesh announced a paradigm shift here on Sunday by urging the Coffee Board and all sections of the industry to formulate within a month a one-point plan for doubling within the next 10 years domestic coffee consumption, officially estimated at 75,000 tonnes.
Coffee Board chairman GV Krishna Rao said that the ministry had accepted a proposal to rope in the expertise of the world's leading coffee-growing country Brazil which had trebled its domestic coffee consumption during the 1980s.
Addressing first a coffee awards ceremony and then a press conference, Mr Ramesh said that the Coffee Board's rationale henceforth should be not so much to boost foreign-exchange earnings through exports as to brew up domestic consumption which did not account for more than 20% of the country's crop.
Boosting domestic consumption was, he said, the most effective way of protecting growers from very volatile world prices, and a far more sustainable solution than short-term fire-fighting measures like last year's Coffee Relief Package. The minister stressed the need for value-added coffee exports while noting that two-thirds of the quantum of shipments was in a green, bean form.
Value-added exports should, he felt, account for at least 50% of coffee shipments. The recent announcements of 100% FDI for coffee-processing and warehousing should, he said, facilitate the process of value-addition for both the export and domestic market.
Mr Ramesh also noted that one reason why the domestic coffee-plantation sector had not been able to withstand a prolonged four-year period of plummeting world bean prices from the year '00 was because over 98% of cultivators were small individual growers unlike tea where corporatisation was far more pronounced. Co-operatisation was another option and he said he had held discussions with the National Dairy Development Board chairman and urged her to formulate within a month a proposal for a co-operative structuring of the plantation sector.
Finally, the minister suggested that an alternate cropping pattern where coffee planters also cultivated medicinal and aromatic plants which did not upset the ecological balance could shore up the income of growers, especially with Bangalore developing into a biotech centre and manufacturers of traditional herbal medicines setting up base in and around the city. Alternating coffee with vanilla would not, he said, help since the prices of both commodities were volatile.
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