Planning commission sets up working group on rainfed areas for the eleventh five year plan

The terms of reference of the working group are as follows -

• Measures for harmonization of incentive programmes and organisation for land and water development at agroclimatic sub region levels and its integration at higher levels.
• Suggest economic and financial incentives for sustainable land and water development programmes.
• Suggest suitable policies for technological support and economic & financial policies for integrating tree crops, biofuels etc.
• Review and widen watershed based framework for implementation of integrated Natural Resource Management in rainfed areas with emphasis upon participatory village and family based planning and diversification of land use and farming systems.
• Suggest the programmes for marketing, infrastructure & policy support for income generation in post water harvesting phases such as market integration support possibilities, value addition strategic linkups between farmers and producers associations and corporate and profit making groups engaged in national and global markets.
• Suggest modalities to enable Gram Panchayats to access funds under National Rural Employment Guarantee Act for development of rainfed agriculture.
• Any other Terms of Reference that may be decided by the Working Group in its first meeting.

The working group made the following recommendations:

• It is important for India to retain tariffs on products that are critical from the point of view of maintaining food security and livelihoods, given that the international prices of many of these commodities have remained sticky at low levels in recent years
• Pulses are very important for India’s rural economy, particularly because they withstand dryland conditions. They also constitute a major component of the diet of the poorest of the poor. It is important to protect the domestic production of pulses and supplies have to be assured. There is adequate cushion between the applied and bound rates.  Import duty on pulses has to be fixed taking these factors into account. 
• For pulses, concerted efforts should be made to attain technological breakthrough in substantially increasing yield rates from their current levels. 
• Greater emphasis will have to be put on the development of High Yielding Varieties (HYV) of seeds by the research institutions so as to attain a high degree of self-sufficiency in production of pulses.
• Low cost production strategy (specially in case of oilseeds) has been successfully adopted by some Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. The cost structure and also other relevant parameters attained by these countries should be studied by DES/CACP so that this could be replicated in India.
• MSP related domestic costs of edible oils are not adequately protected by the current levels of tariffs.  Tariffs on edible oils should be revised upwards for sustaining the minimum level of price support to oilseed growers.
• Policy can be designed to establish a level playing field between highly subsidized imported and domestic cotton for the Indian yarn manufacturer. This can consist of automatic setoffs for the producer.
• Considering the fact that the MSP regime essentially reflects the cost of production of relatively low cost domestic producers, it is essential that levels of import tariffs be so fixed that these provide adequate protection to at least these producers.  Here the role of CACP needs to be expanded to recommend levels of import tariffs.
• Import tariffs must be varied with world prices.  Based on the logic of minimum protection, an automatic and transparent policy of variable tariffs on agricultural imports linked to the deviation of spot international prices from their long-run trends needs to be introduced.  Such variable tariffs are imperative not only for stabilization of prices of all agricultural commodities in open market but also for sustaining the MSP.  
• Introduction of a system of variable tariffs requires a new institutional arrangement under which world prices as well as import trends could be monitored on a real time basis and tariff calibrated accordingly.
• Review of tariffs must be undertaken more frequently than the current practice of doing this exercise annually on the eve of budget presentation or at the time of declaration of EXIM policy. 

Read the report here