Planting material arrives from USA

Subhash Rajta

Tribune News Service

Shimla, February 10

The first consignment of the planting material of temperate fruits, mainly apple, from the USA has landed in India. The state Horticulture Department had placed an order for around 10 lakh plants and rootstock with five nurseries in three different states of the USA. The order includes new commercial varieties of apple-like crimson topaz, honeycrisp, premier honeycrisp, embrojia, etc, and some older varieties of rootstock. On the flip side, the overall cost of these plants and rootstock is going to be over Rs 900.

“The planting material costs us between $9 and $12 per piece in the USA. If you add the cost of transportation and post-entry quarantine (PEQ), where these plants will be kept for a year to ensure they are disease free before they are distributed, the total cost will be more than Rs 900 per plant,” said Horticulture Director JP Sharma, who headed the five-member team that visited the USA to place the order.

To put this cost into perspective, the apple plants imported from Italy were offered for Rs 355 a piece this year without any subsidy. “It will be difficult to offer subsidy on these plants as the World Bank will not allow it. Maybe, we can find some other way of subsidising it and offering it at a reasonable price to the farmers,” said Sharma.

The first priority at the moment though would be to get the entire planting material to the PEQ sites. “We have already lost some time because of Covid. Anyhow, we have the PEQ sites ready in Shimla, Sirmaur, Solan and Bilaspur,” he added. Sharma said that of the total order, around 20 per cent were grafted plants and the remaining rootstock. “Besides offering these to cluster farmers, we will multiply rootstock to reduce our dependence on imported planting material,” he said.

The order was placed with five nurseries in Washington, Pennsylvania and Oregon. “The availability was less even in the USA this time, but we somehow managed to place the required order,” said Sharma.

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