Virtual Fruits Market – An Application for Farmer
The
role that agriculture should play on economic development has been recognized
for years. The adoption of new technologies designed to enhance farm output and
income has received particular attention as a means to accelerate economic development.
However, output growth is not only determined by technological innovations but
also by the efficiency with which available technologies are used. The
potential importance of efficiency as a means of fostering production has
yielded a substantial number of studies focusing on agriculture. The rising
cost of food that has hurt both Indian pockets and politicians’ electoral
prospects in the past year is often blamed on a multilayer system of middlemen
involved in the distribution of produce from farm to fork. So project is to
help farmers. Introduced in the 1960s, these legally-enshrined committees
prohibit farmers from dealing directly with buyers and require them to sell to
licensed middlemen. So the aim was to give India’s huge farming community a fair
and consistent price for their product. But over the years, the system has
created several layers of intermediaries, lengthening the supply chain and
increasing the opportunity for cartels to form, which in turn drive prices down
for farmers and up for consumers. Removing fruits and vegetables from the
control of these committees would allow the produce to find its true market
value and damp down inflation, according to analysts [7]. India’s poor
infrastructure in crop producing regions also enables middlemen to deceive
farmers as to the true value of the produce they are selling. Most of the
warehouses are near the cities, increasing post-harvest losses through rotting.
India is currently the world’s second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables
and the post-harvest losses are estimated at nearly 30%. Farmers have little
option but to send their produce to urban markets as there are no warehouses
close to their fields[6].
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