Just removing middleman and apmc will not solve problems for small farmers. These small farmers don't have access to transport facilities at their disposal, their farm produce is also not huge in particular for vegetable growing farmers.
Till now the middleman used to pick produces at source from multiple farmers and used to bring them on lorries and trucks to big wholesale markets.
In some regions farmers have formed cooperative to bring their products to markets.
Still it's not possible that they will directly bring it to consumer.
In kolkata in particular rajarhat I have seen farmers bringing their produce from surrounding areas to local markets.
Case is worst for seasonal vegetable for example gobi in winter season grow in abundance and prices fall below rupee a kilo by evening, farmers cannot take back their produce as fresh supplies is ready in field for next days. So normally they dump it on way back.
What is needed in these cases is slicing danthal, stripping leaves away and just packing phool in cellophines and using deep refrigeration technique pack them and supply away to regions where gobi is not grown.
This requires either corporate or cooperative model on lines of amul or mother dairy, and certainly requires capital infusion, expertise and machinery, transportation etc.
Which neither apmc can have or farmers themselves can do.
Mapping produce regions to consumption area is technology oriented and requires real-time information network, the best analogy is operation of FedEx, flipkart or Amazon.
For non perishable goods like cereal, legume, grains, pulses things are more simpler but requires massive warehousing investment.
Government has taken several steps but government alone cannot do justice, in my view they should be involved in macro economic management of policy framing, forecasting, import and export balances but should not get into procurement storage distribution or selling because they have been doing this since last 70 years and no one is happy neither farmer, middleman, companies nor consumer.
29 August 2016
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