FPMU will submit proposals to government soon

The food planning and monitoring unit (FPMU) will submit a set of recommendations to the government soon that include developing proper marketing system to ensure fair prices of the growers product.
Earlier the FPMU, which is under the ministry of food, conducted a research recently to ensure fair prices of growers' produce, a high official of the ministry of food said.
"We have conducted a research at the grassroots level to ascertain how the growers could get the real prices of their products," a high official of the FPMU who was involved in the process told the FE Thursday.  
He said that the FPMU will submit its report to the ministry soon with a set of recommendations to facilitate the growers.
The FPMU is responsible for monitoring the food security situation in the country and the implementation of related policies.
"We will submit our report to the ministry with some specific recommendations within the next few days for taking necessary steps," the official said.
He said that they will recommend to the government to ensure fair prices of farmers' products through streamlining the existing food grains procurement process.
The field-level officials of the department concerned have identified some problems that the growers face in getting fair prices of their products.
The official said it will recommend to the government construction of roads in remote areas, so that farmers can smoothly bring their products to markets for sale.
The recommendations will also include developing proper marketing system, and dismantling middlemen's nexus in the government procurement system, establishing more godowns by the government and rice-mills by the private sector, and announcing procurement of food grains by the government at least one month before the harvest of crops.
Fixation of food grain procurement prices considering the farmers, increase in amount of subsidy on agricultural inputs, and enhancement of storage capacity of public warehouses in view of the country's annual production of food grains, will also be, among the recommendations.
At present the aggregate storage capacity of the public warehouses is nearly 1.7 million tonnes. The government has a plan to increase it to 2.5 million tonnes by 2021.