Immediately after the Naga king chilli went international after being declared the hottest chilli in the world, there was a flurry of activities from all quarters - the government, the horticulture department, entrepreneurs and of course, farmers. Peren, Kohima and Mon districts were declared potential areas for cultivation of this spice by the department; and this was followed by trainings, equipments and other facilities being provided. The Government of Nagaland, not to be left behind, rushed into a three-sided memorandum of understanding (MoU) with India’s leading tobacco company, ITC Ltd and the Spices Board for producing and marketing Naga Chillies through a host of initiatives. The farmers fueled with optimism, have begun cultivating the ‘hot’ commodity on a scale like never before.
For this matter, a nursery in Jalukie has been selected as the model project for the ITC where a high tech nursery has been erected by the department to grow the chilli saplings. These saplings are to be distributed to farmers of the Union of Cooperative Society, and plantation will be done on an area of about 40 hectares of land by different farmers by mid-April. The first harvest is expected by the first week of July which will be quite a huge quantity of the spice but till now the disposal of the product remains ambiguous.
Though according to the MoU with the ITC, the company has assured to “buy back” the spice from farmers, there is no mention of the rate at which the company will buy the chilli from the farmers. According to the government, the rates will depend entirely between the farmers and the ITC, however, it is expected that consensus will not be easily arrived at.
With the price of the Naga King chilly reaching as high as Rs. 180 per kg even in the local market, the farmers are bound to expect a similar, if not more from the ITC, while the company will need to procure the produce at the lowest rate possible in order to make a profit. In this case, it is probable that the King chilly from Peren and other districts will flood the market resulting in a huge surplus and inevitable loss for the farmers.
Another factor which will affect the rate between the farmers and the ITC is the MoU itself, which has an understanding of “Buy Back” from the farmers, based on the assumption that the company will help in “technology transfer” during the cultivation. However, it is disclosed that the company had invested very little in the cultivation of the spice with the state Horticulture department chipping in most of the resources for this cultivation, in which case, ITC is expected to profit at any rate considering their lack of investment.
The present scenario prevailing in the state, leaves the chilly farmers vulnerable to exploitation as far as the rates of the spice is concerned. With the expected rise in production of this commodity, the local market will be flooded with surplus which will only aggravate the price of chilly to the profit of non-local middle men. Another matter of great concern is the lack of storage facilities which will not help matters considering the high perishable character of the Naga King chilly. Moreover, there is no facility to even dry the king chilly on such a mass scale. The Horticulture Department had last year bought and distributed about 10 solar drying units for Naga king chilly but farmers found these solar dryers unsuitable for Nagaland climate which contains high relative humidity. Home dried chilies are also found to be unsuitable in the market because of the smell of smoke that persists in the product.
At this crucial juncture, the state government needs to immediately take steps to ensure that our local farmers are not at the wrong end of the bargain while also preparing and educating the farmers on settling for a reasonable rate. Instead of simply taking the credit and washing off its hands from a ‘done-deal’, the government, in collaboration with the horticulture department and the state agricultural marketing apparatus must be involved in bringing the local farmers and the national company to a consensus over the rates. Such an initiative from the government will go a long way in ensuring the viability of a long term commercial market for the local farmers else, the Naga farmers are anticipated to face another discouragement of wasted labour, time and money amidst a field of rotted hottest chilly in the world. The impending doom can be seized up in the words of Heikiting, a farmer from Jalukie spearheading the model project, who says, “We are entirely depending on the ITC…, If the ITC fails to buy it (chilly), we are done for”.
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