Nagaland’s organic cardamom production one of the best practices — NITI Aayog

Kohima: Organic large cardamom production from Nagaland is one of the “best practices” in the agriculture sector, according to NITI Aayog.

The report titled ‘Best practices in social sector: A compendium 2023’, jointly brought out by National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) and United Nations Development Programme, was recently released with an aim to achieve the objectives of 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Nagaland’s organic large cardamom production, an initiative of farmers’ producer company (FPC), got the mention for producing and developing a value chain for organic large cardamom.

It has reaped high economic benefits for the farmers in Nagaland with its nodal agency — department of Horticulture, and Phek Organic Large Cardamom Producer Company, a FPC registered under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, it stated.

The report said the organic cultivation of large cardamom proved to be a “highly profiting” enterprise and subsequently, the farming community achieved a “very good harvest” and earned INR 54, 60, 000 from the sale of 12 MT of large cardamom capsules in Dimapur at INR 455 per kg.

It stated that the dried large cardamom capsules are harvested and available from October till May.

The income generated from the sale of large cardamom during the last three years.

Year	Production (MT)	Turnover (INR in Lakh)
2018-19	20	100.00
2019-20	45	250.00
2020-21	65	320

The company has also started to venture into the by-products of cardamom fibre, while women and unemployed youth have also been imparted training on large cardamom fibre craft since 2021.

Meanwhile, it stated that the challenges faced by the farmer production company were crop damage due to natural calamities like droughts and heavy rainfall, disease and infection resulting in lesser yield, inadequate storage space for the large amount of dried cardamom capsules before their transportation to the market and lack of drying machines, resulting in poorly dried capsules.

Besides other challenges such as high transportation costs,  lack of facilities for packaging, labelling and branding of the product and lack of processing machinery and equipment.

 ‘Cultivating commercial crops is known to generate higher revenue than conventional crops. However, the absence of a crop-specific value chain that caters to the processing, handling and marketing of these commercial crops has restricted the number of farmers cultivating them’.

‘The objective is to develop commodity-specific organic value chain and address gaps in organic crop production, wild crop harvesting, organic livestock management and processing, handling and marketing of organic agricultural products with necessary infrastructural, technical and financial support which will enable farmers to replace conventional and subsistence farming system with high value commercial organic enterprises,’ it read.

The initiative facilitated partnerships between farmers and organic businesses in domestic and export markets in the form of FPCs, while linking cultivators with growers. The FPCs support the development of entire value chains starting from inputs, seeds, certification, creation of facilities for collection, aggregation, processing, marketing and brand-building initiations.

It maintained that over the years, the social sector in India has shown notable success with a vast number of developmental interventions by different stakeholders, especially the Central ministries and state governments and have displayed innovative approaches, effective strategies, long-lasting impact, and sustainability in reaching out to the most marginalised sections of the population.

NITI Aayog released the compendium on best practices in the social sector and the research has been done in collaboration with UNDP, which includes 75 case studies from all states, 30 ministries and departments of the government of India.