ABSTRACT
110India is among the world’s largest producers of horticultural crops, but marketing linkages in horticulture remain extremely weak. Huge differences between what the consumers pay and what the farmers receive are very common, and margins are often found to be as high as 80-90%. This reflects not only unreasonable profits but also marketing inefficiencies because of which both the farmers and consumers suffer. Transformation of the marketing linkages remains a major concern and the challenges for solutions to this include: how to organize sustained production and procurement from large numbers of small farmers, how to ensure adoption of the right technology and practices by farmers to generate quantity and quality output at a reasonable cost, how to ensure investment in the state-of-the-art processing technology and meet working capital need, how to deliver a strong marketing effort to reach consumers and open nascent markets, and how to bring inclusive management and control to ensure win-win across stakeholders including farmers, consumers, and investors. To address these challenges, effective institutions and agri-business models are a must, and it is heartening to see that a number of promising models have emerged in India. These include the HPMC model, the AMUL model, the Pepsi model, the E-choupal model, the McCain model, the Heritage model, the Suguna model, the Desai Cold Storage model, etc. This chapter uses the available literature and data to study and compare these models to see how and to what extent they meet the above mentioned challenges. The lessons and findings are found to be very useful in indicating ways for transforming the marketing linkages of horticultural crops and for designing supportive policies and practices that would lead to sustainable horticulture development.
