Productivity on a plateau while demand soars northwards

India is one of the biggest producers of oilseeds, but ironically it is also heavily dependent on imports to meet its domestic demand for edible oil. This raises the obvious question on why we are not reliant and self sufficient. One explanation is that the country’s oil consumption is so high that output is yet to catch up with the demand.

Moreover, consumers over the last four decades have changed their preferences from groundnut to palm oil, soybean and sunflower. But again, production of these crops was not able to keep pace with the spurt in demand. India’s sources 55% of its total oil requirement from other countries with palm oil accounting for 80% of the imports. The dependence on imports can be attributed to the fact while the demand for oil has been going northwards production of the oilseeds has been either stagnant or sluggish.

Dr. Vishnuvardhan Reddy, Director of Hyderabad based Indian Institute of Oilseeds Research (IIOR) in an interaction with The Hans India, attributed the huge mismatch between domestic production and requirement to a slew of existing grass-root level realities. “One of the major problems is that these crops are chiefly confined to rainfed and near drought conditions.

Moreover, oilseeds are being cultivated only by poor farmers with low resource base on marginal and small farm holdings.” he points out and adds that another impediment in promoting the crops is the non-implementation of minimum support price (MSP) which is depriving the farmers of appropriate remunerative prices. According to him most of farmers located in areas with irrigation sources opt for paddy, since paddy fetches more yield per acre in addition to around three times the revenues compared to oilseeds.

The net profit per acre on sunflower oilseeds is only Rs. 10,000 while that for paddy could be Rs.30,000. “So inevitably, when offered with a choice of growing crops under irrigated conditions, farmers would prefer paddy over oilseeds.” Elucidating on other factors that was resulting in low productivity, Dr.Vishnuvardhan Reddy said that the operational environment was encountering challenges of dwindling quality of natural resource management (NMR) , in addition to low seed replacement impacting the ouput.

The yield per acre in India for groundnut (1261 Kgs), mustard (1094), soybean (1652 kgs) Sunflower (569 kgs) Sesame (406 kgs) and Safflower (807 kgs) is way below those countries with the highest productivity in the world. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the past fifteen years (2000-01 to 2014-15) in terms sown area, production and yield have also dwindled across all edible oilseeds wit sunflower and safflower reflecting a decline towards the negative in both acreage and production.

On the initiatives being taken by the IIOR to reverse this downward trend and achieve high productivity levels, Dr. Vishnuvardhan informed that scientists at the Institute are developing drought-resilient oilseed varieties which enable them to sustain and withstand the drought conditions for longer periods. We are also developing sunflower variety with more oil content.

Earlier we could extract only 17% percent oil from sunflower seeds. With this variety we can extract around 42 percent oil,” he said. Explaining the importance of this development, he said that increase in content could result in increase in oil output. One crucial advantage that emerges from this development is that the high oil content varieties will in one way compensate for the lack of growth in oilseeds productivity level.

By Satyapal Menon