Enhancing Farmers’ Income through Value-Addition in Agriculture

Agriculture forms the foundation of the Indian economy, offering sustenance and employment to a large section of population.Despite its vital role, the agricultural sector faces ongoing challenges that adversely affect the financial stability of the farmers.

- DR. BANARSI LAL

Factors such as fragmented land ownership, price fluctuations, restricted market access etc. contribute to persistently low and unstable incomes for farmers. Although there has been large industrialization in the last 60 years, agriculture still occupies the prominent place of importance. Agriculture has provided us the food security but so far it has failed to provide us the nutritional security. Value addition is the process in which for the same volume of a primary product, a high price is realized by means of processing, packing, upgrading the quality or other such means. Value addition is one of the important components of nutritional security. Sometimes farmers get less price of a particular farm produce due to its surplus production. This problem can be solved by the crop diversification which creates an opportunity to earn more money from the different crops produce. Crop diversification and value addition are the two techniques for the profit maximaztion and nutritional security. The most important problem now-a-days is to provide the remunerative price to the farmers for their farm produce. This problem can be solved by the value addition in different crops produce and can be marketed both inside and outside the country. This can also generate more employment for the rural people. Value added agriculture helps to increase the value of primary agricultural commodities through a particular production process. Small scales processing units, organic food processing, traditional crops production, agri-tourism and bio-fuels development are examples of various value-added projects that have supported to create new jobs in the rural areas.