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"Trade Negotiation A Two-Way Thing": Amul Chief Allays Farmers' Concerns

The India-US trade deal has sparked huge concern among the country's farmers, who feel that cheaper American products coming into the country will add to the challenges they face. The dairy sector, however, feels that those concerns might be misplaced. 

In an exclusive interview with NDTV, Amul's Managing Director  Jayan Mehta said the agreement strongly protects the farmers and the agriculture sector and give them invaluable access to the US market. 

"Market access is a very important part and a trade negotiation is always a two-way thing," he told NDTV. 

"The negotiations were necessary to get larger market access and that was done with this deal. More importantly, the tariffs also coming down from 50 to 18 per cent, will bring in the Indian products, getting better access to those markets and paving a way for the brighter future for all those associated with this sector," he added. 

"One of the key important aspects of the dairy industry and the livestock sector is cattle feed," he said, citing the example of Amul which works with 36 lakh farmers across 18,600 villages of Gujarat and collect and handle about 350 lakh litres of milk every day. 

One of the things Amul needs, he said, is to provide good quality cattle feed, which has a "combination of variety of agricultural-based ingredients like de-oiled rice bran, which comes after the extraction of oil from the husk of the paddy, to maize, rapeseed extractions and molasses".

"At Amul, we have about 8 plants manufacturing close to 12,000 tonnes of cattle feed every day," he said, but even here, India is not importing items for which there is little use, he said, giving the example of DDGS (Distillers Dried Grains with Solubles), a little of which is used in cattle feed.

India has also abundance availability of DDGS because we also started manufacturing ethanol from maize... but you cannot use more than 3 to 4% of DDGS in this.  So, there is no practical advantage of having that commodity coming into the country under the free trade agreement," he said.

"So, per se, there is nothing to worry for the cattle feed sector, for the dairy sector and for the farm sector... announced in the recent trade negotiation," he added.

The famer organisations of the country -- spearheaded by the Samyukt Kisan Morcha and All India Kisan Sabha -- have announced a one-day strike on February 12.

In a statement, the SKM alleged that the deal was a "total surrender" of Indian agriculture and farmers to American multinational corporations. 

"The framework is an abject rejection of the claim of the Commerce Minister that the agriculture and dairy sectors are out of the Free Trade Agreements (FTA) and the Government of India will not make any compromise on the interests of agriculture," read a statement from the farmers' groups.



from NDTV News- Special https://ift.tt/atCgLY2
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