CU LTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY India is on the threshold of large-scale potato mechanisation rural areas and they can’t all move to the cities’, Dutt Sharma points to the dilemma which India is currently facing. ‘So it’s important that the government will now actually start carrying out its plans for land consolidation. In India the potato plots are usually small. By increasing the plot size, agriculture – which still formed 50 percent of the Gross Domestic Product during the nineteen sixties and has now dropped to 25 percent – can expand again’, Dutt Sharma says. He has every confidence that the current government – which was elected with the highest majority ever – will take the right steps in that direction. ‘Without land consolidation, the necessary mechanisation of the cultivation of potatoes will become problematic.’ Under the watchful eye of Huib Smit, Ambassador Fons Stoelinga carries out the official opening of the Indian Allround Vegetable Processing factory. Land consolidation a necessity Ambala is about a five-hour drive to the northeast of Delhi. A trip that’s an adventure in itself. The roads in India are extremely crowded. Especially in the relatively cool nights. At times four rows thick, lorries randomly overtake each other on the left or right in places where the road has only two lanes. In order to somehow handle this lane and speed changing safely, each driver is required to honk and use his lights a great deal with every attempt at overtaking. The often fully-loaded lorries transport all kinds of products across the length and breadth of the country. Although India has a national government, the separate States are largely autonomous. ‘So it’s often very difficult to transport goods from one State to another’, Maheshwar Dutt Sharma, CEO of Allround India explains. In spite of challenges such as these, food for the rapidly-expanding population is very important, Dutt Sharma emphasises. ‘During the nineties, a government actually collapsed as a result of the fact that the price of potatoes and onions had risen sky high at that moment. It’s because of this that the government itself now purchases the staple foods of cereal and rice at a fixed price and takes care of storage all through the year to secure sufficient availability. The price that growers receive for their produce is far too low, which is why people are leaving the rural areas en masse to move to the urban centres. A flow the government would very much like to contain. There are now about 600 million people living in the Local production The tour around the 7,000 square metre floor area of the factory in Ambala, which we’re doing together with Fons Stoelinga, the Dutch ambassador in India, and Wouter Verhey, the Agriculture Counsellor, gives a picture of an organised site where the Indian employees work. ‘The high import levies and the demand for local market pro‘From the very first day that we’ve been active in India, we’ve been making machinery of exactly the same quality as that made in the Netherlands’ explains Smit in the factory building that has a total surface of 7,000 square metres. 18 Potato World 2017 • number 1 Pagina 17
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