Rice Brawl Of India

MP fights to be included among the recognised Basmati rice-growing states, but other producers are not keen to share their imminent GI status.

- Rahul Noronha

Till 2009, Fatehsingh Meena, 50, a farmer in Gudawal village of Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh, was growing soyabean as his main Kharif crop on the 25 acres he farms. It fetched him Rs 7,000- Rs 8,000 per acre. That year, he shifted to cultivating ‘Basmati’ rice, and his profits soared to Rs 40,000 an acre. The prosperity showed. Meena moved from a bike to a Bolero, married off two daughters and built a house in state capital Bhopal. “The returns from basmati helped me lease out more land for the next Rabi season too, adding to my income,” he says.

But the party may well end for Meena and over one-and-a-half lakh farmers like him in Madhya Pradesh. Millers who have investments worth crores stand to lose too. Between October 18 and October 28, the Chennai-based Registrar of Geographical Indications (GI) will hold hearings in New Delhi to decide whether MP can be added to the list of seven states—Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Western UP, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh—for which the Agriculture and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) in Delhi, a statutory body responsible for export promotion and development of certain scheduled products, had sought a GI tag in 2008. Punjab and Haryana are opposing the move, saying that ‘basmati’ cultivation in MP is a recent trend and including it in basmati-producing states will compromise the quality of the long-grained aromatic rice that the world knows as basmati. MP, for its part, has been in a tussle over the issue for the last eight years (see timeline: MP’s Fight for Basmati Right), insisting that farmers in the state have traditionally been cultivating basmati rice, marshalling historical evidence to support their claim.

THE GI JOCKEYING