Farmers weeding out drudgery with mechanised equipment
India set to ease credit crunch
INDIA’S government is expected to ramp up spending in its latest budget this week, seeking to ease the pain from a ban on highvalue banknotes that slammed the brakes on its economy.
Ahead of a series of elections, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will unveil a budget on Wednesday that analysts say will aim to offset the impact from the demonetisation program with stimulus measures.
“The overarching focus of the budget will somehow indicate a gain from pain mentality – how the pain of demonetisation helped the government get some extra resources that it can now spread around,” Rajeev Malik, senior economist at brokerage CLSA, said.
Before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s shock decision in November to pull all 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation, the International Monetary Fund had forecast India’s economy would grow 7.6 percent in 2016, faster than any other major country.
But as authorities struggled to replace notes fast enough, causing consumer spending to plunge, the IMF knocked a percentage point off its forecast.
By painting demonetisation as a blitz on corruption and cash-hoarding that will ultimately boost tax revenues, Modi has so far escaped a major backlash. While there were massive queues outside banks in the weeks afterwards, they have now subsided while limits on withdrawals have eased.
But voters in four states – including key battlegrounds of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab – will have a chance to deliver their verdict when they begin going to the polls in multi-phase elections from February 4.
CAMBODIA is shaking off the legacy of the Khmer Rouge’s agrarian dystopia and deploying increasingly sophisticated agricultural machinery to reduce human and animal toil, and increase productivity, according to the latest government data.
A Ministry of Agriculture report released this month shows the use of mechanised agricultural equipment has doubled in the past five years and over 90 percent of farming land preparation is now done by machinery instead of draft animals.
“The use of agricultural machinery is increasing and most farming has transformed from manual labour or cattle-driven equipment to machinery,” said ministry spokesman Lor Reaksmey.
“Mechanisation plays an important role in furthering the productivity of farming.”
According to the ministry report, the number of tractors operating in the Kingdom has risen nearly threefold in the past five years to 18,317. The figures also a marked increase in the usage of harvesters, with the number deployed rising over 320 percent in five years to 6,605. Milling machinery use increased 13 percent to 54,965 during the period, while threshing machines – which remove seeds from cereal grains – dipped 10 percent to 13,765.
Mechanisation is increasingly trickling down to smallscale farming operations. Power tillers, the two-wheeled “walking tractors” favoured by smallholder farmers are now ubiquitous, with a total of 343,764 nationwide – a fourfold increase since 2011.
Nhoem Sitha, regional sales manager for Kubota Cambo- dia, a distributor for the Japanese brand of agricultural machinery, said sales grew quickly in recent years as farmers embraced the extra productivity of mechanisation but have begun to level off.
“If we compare to the past five years, we can see the use of machinery has doubled,” he said.
“Farmers are changing from manual labour to mechanised farming because the price of agricultural products is highly volatile so they need to speed up their harvesting by using tractors [and other mechanised equipment].”
Yet even with more farmers using agricultural machinery, sales growth has slowed this year as small farmers making razor-thin profits look for ways to cut expenditures, such as day-use equipment rentals.
“Despite the growing trend of mechanisation in the agricultural sector sales have been flat this year as most farmers prefer to rent equipment rather than buy it,” he said.
Uong Nimol, key account manager for RMA Cambodia, the authorised distributor of John Deere in the Kingdom, said the brand has also seen a slowdown in sales growth. He attributed the trend to both thinner profits in farming and a wider array of machinery brands to choose from.
“Since there a lot of [different brands] now sharing the market our sales have stabilised,” he said
Nimol added that while farmers were adopting mechanisation the low prices of agricultural commodities were discouraging them from investing their small returns on purchases of new equipment. Instead, they were pooling their resources through farmer cooperatives to purchase a single tractor for time-share use.
Cambodia has an estimated 800 agricultural cooperatives, which represent tens of thousands of smallholder farmers.
Dem Sreylim, deputy director of Agricultural Development Chamroeurn Phal Raing Kesei, an agricultural coop- erative in Battambang’s Raing Kesei commune, said most of the 228 member farmers own at least one power tiller, a stark change from just a decade ago when nearly all used cattle to plow and harrow the soil. The mechanisation has cut the time it takes to plow a hectare of field from 10 days down to a single morning.
“Almost every household has a two-wheeled tractor for their daily activities in the field,” she said.
“This saves them time and labour, especially as our youth have emigrated in search of work.”
For larger jobs, member farmers can hire the cooperative’s single tractor for use.