Anantha Horticulture Conclave Projects District as Nation’s Fruit Bowl
Kesav called on IT professionals and realtors to invest on lands in their home towns and villages, which could give huge returns in the form of horticulture development and profits.
Anantapur: The one-day Anantha Horticulture Conclave-25 here on Wednesday aimed to make Anantapur district the nation’s fruit bowl in view of the rich quality of the fruit varieties in this region.
Stating this, finance minister Payyavula Kesav said, “Our banana has a huge demand in Middle East countries while the papaya, musk melon captured the Delhi market and our sweet orange dominates the Nagpur market. This is because of the excellent soil condition here.”
By providing facilities and technical assistance -- from seed to marketing stages -- with the help of experts and traders, the Anantha brand of fruits would sell more in a shorter span, the minister hoped.
The horticulture conclave was held at the MYR function hall, where Keshav referred to the pathetic condition of farmers in past decades and said they now concentrated on quality and export of their produce.
“More than 1 lakh tonnes of banana was recently exported to the Middle East. Farmers are now getting Rs 25,000 on a tonne as against the below Rs 12,000 in the previous years. A similar marketing push will be given for five other horticulture products -- pomo granite, tomato, sweet orange and red chilli,” he said.
The minister stressed the need to provide end-to-end solutions for horticulture produce from nursery to international marketing. “Anantapur is already the fruit bowl of the state, contributing 25 per cent to State GVA (Gross Value Addition) as part of the Swarna Andhra 2047 initiative. AP’s banana was competing well with Turkey, he said, and added that many companies were part of the day’s event.
He said there was a need for AP to concentrate on climate resilience and drought resilience solutions to overcome the problems of untimely heavy rain and rain deficit conditions.
Kesav called on IT professionals and realtors to invest on lands in their home towns and villages, which could give huge returns in the form of horticulture development and profits.
On the occasion, 7 companies signed MoUs with AP, namely Micro Algae Solutions, Siddhartha Cold Storage, Kousuri Bajaj Agro, Green Gurukulam, Agro Life Science Corporation and Puro Natural.
Eleven persons were felicitated by the minister. They were Simhadri Raghavendra of Elite Technologies, BC Nirmala of CARD NGO, S Boyapati of Avani Farms, Digital Greens, Srikrishna Impex and best farmers from the district, namely GD Karthik, mango; Raja Babu, sweet orange; Chandra Naik, tomato, K Chowdhary, red chillies; and R Shankar Reddy, banana cultivation.
Special chief secretary to agriculture and horticulture B Rajasekhar, government whip Kalava Srinivasulu, former minister and MLAs Paritala Sunitha and Bandaru Sravani, Kalyandurg MLA Amilineni Surendra Babu, Guntakal MLA Jayaram and Tadipatri municipal chairperson JC Prabhakar Reddy, CEO of AP Food Processing Sekhar Babu and several others were present.