A way forward for farmers

KOCHI: Coconut Producers Society(CPS), a Coconut Development Board (CDB) initiative, is all set to expand to newer territories in the coming months. The project, introduced last year, integrates several small coconut farms to reduce input costs and increase efficiency. Under the present scheme, the board will recognise groups of coconut producers consisting of 40-100 members with about 5000 coconut palms under them. Once formed, the coconuts under a particular society will be managed by the society. This will include  manuring, pest control, harvesting, marketing, etc.“One of the major problems with coconut farming is that our lands are small. Hence on such a small scale, the costs of buying equipments, transportation costs and labour charges make coconut farming unprofitable. But when this is done in an integrated fashion, the costs can be reduced. The case with output too is similar. When one is selling small quantities, the capacity for the producer to bargain, to go in for exports or to take to better markets is less this will all change with the formation of producers society,” said T K Jose, chairman, Coconut Development Board.The CDB will provide assistance to the Producers Societies in processing activities, purchase of farm implements, training workshops, seminars and field visits. “Some of these producers can be trained in scientific practices and they can do the farming for the whole society. “This will help in encountering the problem of labour shortage and absentee farms,” said the chairman.The CDB is also looking at integrating Friends of Coconut(FOC) farming scheme with these societies. The trained coconut climbers under FOC have the capacity to pluck as many as 60 to 120 palms in a day. Farms under Producers Societies are also an avenue for this type of large scale operations.The CDB is also looking at further integrating producers societies into block level Federations. As the Federations can then be integrated into Coconut Producers Company for commercial production.In its earlier phase, the programme was aimed as an extension of its earlier programme of developing Coconut Clusters. Under this programme, the CDB gave an assistance of ` 35,000 per hectare to the farmers. The financial burden made the CDB to reduce the number of clusters. “We had to limit the number of clusters to 10-15 per year. But soon we realised that under the circumstances it will be difficult to obtain even a target of 1000 clusters. It was then that we switched to the newer version,” said a senior marketing officer from CDB.As of now there are 114 CPS. Under the improvised scheme, the CDB is looking at a target of 1000 CPSs in the state in the financial year ending March 2012.