Union Agriculture Minister, Shri Radha Mohan Singh addressed the Agriculture Minister of 23 States and Union Territories at Hubli on Thursday to observe the live functioning of the electronic trading in APMCs introduced by Government of Karnataka.
“We are visiting a best practice introduced by a State Government for learning and sharing with other States. The visit demonstrates our spirit of cooperative federalism and the second green revolution can only take off with a marketing revolution” Minister said on this occasion.
Earlier, as reported in these columns, the Union Cabinet approved the establishment of the National Agriculture Market and this visit by the Minister was a follow-up to that decision. All of us share the feeling that agriculture market in India needs to be modernized and reformed for the larger benefit of farmers, the trading community and consumers, Radha Mohan said.
Compared to several countries, India incurs too much wastage of its farm produce due to inefficient and antiquated marketing practices. Agricultural marketing practices are crying for reforms as said by many experts in the past. Radha Mohan said that the second Green Revolution can only take off with a marketing revolution.
The National Agriculture Market is envisaged as a pan-India electronic trading portal which seeks to network the existing APMC and other market yards to create a unified national market for agricultural commodities. NAM is a “virtual” market but it has a physical market (mandi) at the back end.