Price assurance to oil palm farmers for fresh Fruit bunches
The Union Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has given its approval to launch a new Mission on Oil palm to be known as the National Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm (NMEO-OP) as a new Centrally Sponsored Scheme with a special focus on the North east region and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
A financial outlay of Rs 11,040 crore has been made for the scheme, out of which Rs 8,844 crore is the Government of India share and Rs 2,196 crore is State share and this includes the viability gap funding also.
Under this scheme, it is proposed to cover an additional area of 6.5 lakh hectare for oil palm till the year 2025-26 and thereby reaching the target of 10 lakh hectares ultimately. The production of Crude Palm Oil (CPO) is expected to go upto 11.20 lakh tonnes by 2025-26 and upto 28 lakh tonnes by 2029-30.
The proposed scheme will subsume the current National Food Security Mission-Oil Palm programme.
There are two major focus areas of the Scheme. The oil palm farmers produce Fresh Fruit Bunches (FFBs) from which oil is extracted by the industry. Presently the prices of these FFBs are linked to the international CPO prices fluctuations. For the first time, the Government of India will give a price assurance to the oil palm farmers for the FFBs. This will be known as the Viability Price (VP).
To give impetus to the North-East and Andaman, the government will additional bear a cost of 2 per cent of the CPO price to ensure that the farmers are paid at par with the rest of India.
The second major focus of the scheme is to substantially increase the assistance of inputs/interventions.