Telangana bets big on oil palm
TELANGANA is targeting
2 million additional acres under oil palm cultivation in the next four years, and is going to great lengths to achieve this goal - from building large dams and irrigation canals to importing millions of germinated sprouts.
Generous government subsidies and bumper profit potential compared to other crops are also encouraging farmers to shift to oil palms.
‘Oil palm is giving more than $2,536 per acre return to farmers who planted the crop some years back. In rice, I am struggling to earn $540 even after putting in lots of effort' said Pullarao Daravathu, who was planting oil palm on his 5-acre farm at Sathupally, nearly 300 km (186 miles) east of Hyderabad, the state capital.
The recent rally in palm oil prices has more than doubled prices of fresh fruit bunches, which farmers sell to oil mills.
For years, price volatility, water scarcity and a gestation period of nearly four years limited oil palm plantation in India to less than 1 million acres, mostly in coastal Andhra Pradesh, the state that Telangana was carved out of in 2014.
But Telangana, which occupies an inland region on the Deccan Plateau, is now keen to emerge as India's main palm oil hub, with an area target that would place the state as the fifth largest oil palm grower globally – from a negligible base currently.