Agriculture sector needs structured and functional markets, preferably to vicinity of farmers, to drive growth, employment, remunerative prices and economic prosperity in rural areas of the country. Enabling mechanism are also required to be put in place for procurement of agricultural commodities directly from farmers’ field and to establish effective linkage between the farm production, the retail chain and food processing industries. Keeping in view the progressive reforms being advocated, Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers’ Welfare has formulated a new Model Agricultural produce and Livestock Marketing (Promotion & Facilitation) Act, 2017 and released to States/UTs on 24.04.2017 for adoption. The new model Act provides the farmers options for markets beyond the existing APMC regulated market yards. The provisions include inter alia private markets, direct marketing, farmer-consumer markets, special commodity market yards, declaring warehouses/silos/cold storages or such structures as market sub yards so as to reduce the number of intermediaries between producer and buyer and increase the share of the farmer in consumer’s rupee.
Since the provisions of contract farming with the APMC Acts had a conflict interest and there was no holistic approach to contract farming, the Government following an announcement in the Union Budget, 2017, has constituted a committee on 28.02.2017 under the chairmanship of Additional Secretary (Agricultural Marketing) to formulate a mode Contract Farming Act for adoption by States.
The Government launched National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) scheme on 14.04.2017 to enhance transparency in transactions, price discovery and farmers’ reach to larger number of markets to sell their produce to buyers of their choice at their convenience. The scheme creates a National web based unified agri-marketing portal for inter market and inter-state trading of agri-produce. Transparency and competition will fetch better prices to the farmers for their produce and ensure cashless payments directly to their bank accounts. 585 wholesale regulated markets are targeted to be integrated with e-NAM by March, 2018.