CHENNAI : The State government on Wednesday unveiled an ambitious Food Processing Policy, 2018 which aims at increasing the income of farmers and value addition of farm products while reducing the wastage of food products besides creating employment opportunities. Significantly, the policy offers major incentives like interest subsidy, increased interest subsidy for women or SC/ST entrepreneurs, tax reimbursement, exemption of stamp duty and market fee exemption to food processing industries in the State.
The policy was unveiled by Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami at a function at the Secretariat in the presence of Agriculture Minister R Doraikannu and senior officials. “The policy is expected to create a lot of scope for private entrepreneurs to invest in food processing sector and pave way in augmenting quality production in agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, dairy and fisheries sector since remunerative price to farming community is made possible besides huge employment opportunities in this sector,” Agriculture officials told Express.
The officials also said the policy envisages to encourage and facilitate the setting up of more and more food processing industries and agro-entrepreneurs. The policy identifies seven thrust areas for the sector. One of the key objectives is to increase the percentage of processed food, especially fruits and vegetables to 10 per cent. At present, the processing of agricultural commodities stands at below two per cent in TN as in most parts of the country.
The growth of food processing will have a vast impact on the social and economic development of the State considering the fact that 40 per cent of population is involved in agriculture and allied activities. The policy outlines various initiatives like promotion of food processing clusters, development of food parks, entrepreneurship promotion, establishing skill centres and supporting farmer producer organisations.
These approaches are expected to decrease the post-harvest losses due to better technologies and improved value chain, besides ensuring food availability and nutritional requirement and improve farm gate price to farmers thereby enabling increase in farm income. The policy initiatives will ensure improving the export potential for processed food from the State. Right now, TN has about 24,000 food processing firms registered as small and micro enterprises (SMEs) and about 1,100 medium and large units and the State contributes about seven per cent of the country’s food processing output.
The policy proposes major incentives for the food processing industries: Priority for allotment of SIPCOT/SIDCO land, long lease up to 99 years with above `10 crore investment, outright or lease-based sale to small and micro enterprises, interest subvention of three per cent per annum on the term loan availed for fixed capital investment, interest subvention of five per cent for women or SC/ST entrepreneurs and exemption of stamp duty in the notified food parks and other notified industrial parks.