Introduction

Introduction
  • India is the world's second largest producer of vegetables, but hardly 2 per cent of the produce is processed. About 25-30 percent of the production is wasted due to lack of adequate processing and infrastructure facilities. Besides meeting domestic requirement, the country is meeting the adhoc demands of various foreign markets from the vegetables being produced every year and exports sizeable quantity of vegetable and processed products after completing domestic requirement of vegetables. In 2000-2001, the country exported other fresh vegetables to the tune of Rs 190.84 crore in the preceding year, representing a growth of 32.89 per cent (Verma et al., 2002).
  • India, over the years has been regularly exporting in a variety of fresh vegetables. Sri Lanka, UAE and USA together accounted for more than 50 per cent of the total exports of fresh vegetables in 2000-2001. Onion accounts for 60 per cent of total foreign exchange earning among fresh vegetables. Among other vegetables, 60 per cent share goes to okra, 20 per cent to green chilli and 20 per cent bitter gourd, French bean, capsicum and other mixed vegetables.
  • The non -traditional items meet the requirement of Indian expatriates in South East Asia and Gulf countries and to some extent in the UK go to European countries where growing conditions are not ideal during November. There is a great demand for vegetable products for export because vegetables have shown to earn 20-30 times more foreign exchange per unit area than cereals.
  • India exports sizeable quantity of vegetables and processing products. In the year 2000-2001, dried and preserved vegetables worth Rs 738.29 crores were exported. Besides this, 70821.96 metric tonnes of other processed fruits and vegetables costing worth Rs 206.94 crores were also exported in the same year. Currently onion accounts for 70 per cent of the total foreign exchange earned through export of fresh vegetables. Among other vegetables, 60% share goes to okra, 20% to green chillies and 20% to bitter gourd, french bean, capsicum and other mixed vegetable.
  • In global vegetable markets, Thailand, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, China, Argentina, Indonesia, Egypt. Turkey, Iran, Cyprus, Australia, NewZealand and Holland are the main competitive countries, which export vegetables to different countries.
  • In India, Vegetables are grown in the open and thus their cost of production is less as compared to those grown under protected condition. There is a lot of opportunity to export these vegetables to the European and North American countries from India. Presently our share in world export market is very negligible. If we are to make our presence felt in the export market, considerable development is required in infrastructure and export from India.
  •  Vegetable crops have vast potential for export and processing industries in 2006-07. About 2.75 lakh tonnes of fresh vegetables worth Rs. 43002.06 lakh were exported. During the IXth plan period, export target of fresh vegetables has been fixed to the tune of 7 lakh tonnes (6 lakh tonnes of onion and 1 lakh tonnes of other vegetables like okra, bitter gourd, chilli, garlic, bottle gourd, melons, sweet pepper, beans etc).
  • Different processed products of vegetables, particularly, paste, sauce ketchup (tomato products), pickles (cucumbers, carrot, mixed vegetables), saurkraut (lactic acid fermented product of cabbage), dehydrated products (onion, potato, pea) and frozen vegetables (sweet pepper) have steady export demand.
Last modified: Wednesday, 29 February 2012, 4:40 AM