Tobacco Board relaxes licensing norms for Karnataka growers

Tobacco Board has relaxed norms in renewing licences to Karnataka growers this crop year (2014-15).

The board in order to comply with the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) order to reduce tobacco cultivation had stipulated that the licences for tobacco cultivation were issued only to those who produced the minimum quantity fixed by the board.

In addition to cultivation, the farmer also had to market 50 per cent or more of the fixed quota during the last crop year (2013-14) to get their licences renewed.

This order made about 3,000 licence holders ineligible this crop year. Currently, there are about 38,066 licence holders in Karnataka with 80,000 hectares under tobacco crop. The board has fixed Karnataka’s crop size at 104 million kgs.

Alarmed with this stringent norms, growers led by the newly elected Member of Parliament representing Mysore-Kodagu, Pratap Simha, exerted pressure on the board to ease the order and be lenient to growers.

“Board had taken this tough stand only to keep the crop size within the limit and to prevent unauthorised cultivation. These measures are only in the growers’ interest to get better realisation,” K Gopal, Chairman, Tobacco Board, told Business Line .

“Now after assessing last year’s sales, we found many nil sold cases, few partial sold cases and many borderline cases. In order to help growers this year, we have relaxed few norms to borderline cases only. The board while relaxing the order, now has taken undertaking from growers that they would not violate the order in future,” he added.

The delay in Tobacco Board’s order has led to many growers switching to ginger cultivation. Ginger fetched higher prices than tobacco last year.

According to B N Jayaram, former Tobacco Board member from Karnataka, “The State is likely to see 10 per cent drop in area under tobacco crop this year. Also, many unauthorised cultivators have gone for ginger cultivation.”

Welcoming the board’s decision Jayaram said “Majority of the farmers had missed the target by one to 10 kgs. Also the board woke up to the fact that Karnataka light soil (KLS) tobacco is on par with Zimbabwe in colour and quality, which has good demand in international market.”