Sindhu Jha
NEW DELHI: Apart from foodgrain, India’s export of tobacco and sugar has also seen an upward trend. Except during the pandemic period, the growth in exports in these commodities has been highly encouraging.
In the year 2018-19, India exported tobacco worth $492.97 million, which reached nearly $660 million this year. It was a similar story with sugar exports. The export of sugar in terms of USD value in the year 2018-19 was 490.83 million and it scaled up to $2.649 billion this year.
In May, the Government imposed restrictions on the export of sugar beyond 10 million tonnes, but later allowed another 1.2 million tonnes of shipments, taking the total to 11.2 million tonnes for the 2021-22 marketing year. India’s sugar exports stood at 7 million tonnes in the 2020- 21 marketing year, 5.9 million tonnes in 2019-20 and 3.8 million tonnes in 2018-19.
The Government has set up 13 Agri-Cells in Indian embassies across the world. Its commitment to increase farmers’ income can be seen through significant rise witnessed in agricultural exports. Various initiatives taken by the Government, through APEDA, such as organising B2B exhibitions in different countries, exploring new potential markets through product specific and general marketing campaigns have worked as catalyst in the growth of exports.
The Government has created products matrix for 50 agricultural products with strong export potential and recognised 220 labs to provide services of testing a wide range of products to enable exporters across the country. Indian embassies in Vietnam, USA, Bangladesh, Nepal, UAE, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, China, Japan and Argentina are providing inputs on real-time basis to improve exports to these destinations.
