The Government of India has decided to create dedicated Export Promotion Forums (EPF) for key agri produce in order to augment the agri export from country. Created with APEDA (Agriculture and Processed Food Export Development Authority), these forums are joint initiative taken by the Ministry of Commerce & Industry and Ministry of Agriculture.

An official with the APEDA says that these decisions are result of the internal meetings held to start discussing on formulations of strategy for future beyond Covid-19 crisis.

The forums announced so far are for dairy, rice, onion, mango, banana and grapes and the forums will have major participation of industry representing these products.

According to APEDA, the commodity-specific EPF will have a committee having representation from industry, exporters, officials from APEDA, Ministry of Commerce, Agriculture and even officials representing major producer states.

Further, the EPF will help in bringing the stakeholders at one platform to felicitate to better the supply chain issues amongst other. Also, the forum would keep an eye on the commodity from its production to export and try to help wherever there will be a need.

APEDA says that the dairy product EPF will organise the supply chain of dairy products exports in focussed manner. During 2018-19, India exported 1,13,725.73 MT of dairy products worth US$345.73 million.

Similarly the forum for mango will look into exports of mango exclusively with industry’s participation. APEDA says, that mango EPF will organise supply chain of mango to help the farmers get exporters. In 2018-19, India exported 46510.22MT of mango worth US$ 60.26 million.

Onion also gets a focussed EPF and APEDA eyes to better last year’s export of 21,83,766.42MT of onion worth US$498.17 million. Banana and grapes also get dedicated EPF and APEDA expect the forums to expand export potential for both crops. In 2018-19, 1,35,228.26 MT worth US$59.78 million banana and 246133.8 MT of grapes worth US$334.79 million.

Another major commodity exported by India is rice which also got a dedicated export promotion forum in 2018-19, India exported 77 million MT of rice worth US$ 7770.35 million.