Government To Ensure 25 Percent Return From Agriculture
May 8, 2020 | Investopaper
To attract the youth in agriculture, the government is preparing to ensure at least 25 percent return on cost from the next fiscal year. The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development is going to make such arrangement through the policy and program of the Fiscal Year 2077/78.
The ministry has given priority to such programs to ensure the cost of young people who have left the agricultural profession and returned from foreign employment and farmers engaged in agricultural work.
Similar to fixing support prices for paddy, wheat and sugarcane, the ministry is now preparing to fix the prices by adding 25 per cent minimum return to the cost of production of some food crops, vegetables, pulses and oil seeds, fruits and fish products.
For this, the ministry is also preparing to provide unsecured loan at 3 percent interest rate to small and marginalized farmers. It is preparing to provide home loan to medium and large farmers at 5 percent interest. According to the ministry, the program will benefit the youth returning from foreign employment as well as farmers already engaged in agriculture at home. The ministry claims that this arrangement can also take production from barren land.
Minister for Agriculture and Livestock Development Ghanshyam Bhusal had unveiled a program called Panchasutra to bring change in agriculture. Accordingly, five formulas were formulated to provide subsidy on all commodities of agricultural products, technical services to all farmers, cheap and accessible loan facility, crop and livestock insurance and guarantee of minimum return on farmers’ produce.
The ministry has set a budget limit of Rs 33.18 billion for the coming fiscal year but believes that the budget allocation will be higher than this limit. In the current fiscal year, the federal ministry had received Rs 28 billion.
