Andhra Pradesh Agriculture Mission Vice-Chairman M.V.S. Nagi Reddy urged the Centre to make available all types of fertilizers at affordable rates in the interest of the nation’s food security.
Addressing reporters here, Mr. Nagi Reddy, who is also the State president of the YSR Congress Party’s farmers’ wing, said that farmers were finding it increasingly difficult to do farming in the wake of ever-increasing prices of farm inputs including fertilizers on one hand as well as absence of remunerative price for their produce on the other.
“It is unfortunate that the prices of almost all crops are falling below even the Minimum Support Price (MSP) fixed by the Centre, which has remained a mute spectator to unfair practices by big corporate agri-marketing firms,” Mr. Nagi Reddy alleged.
The decontrolling of the prices of fertilizers other than urea has come as a big blow to farmers, he said, adding that the fertilizer firms had only agreed to sell only the old stocks at low rates.
After diesel, fertilizer prices are taking a toll on the farmers with companies hiking the price by over 45% following a sharp increae in the global prices of raw material, he lamented.
He said the Centre’s direction to fertilizer companies to not hike the maximum retail price (MRP) of non-urea fertilizers was unlikely to give much relief to farmers as now was not the farming season.
