By IANS,
New Delhi : The government is planning to formulate a separate policy for the country’s food processing industry and to scale up research and development (R&D) activities in the sector, Minister for Food Processing Industries Subodh Kant Sahai said here Friday.
“The government is planning to call a meeting of state food processing ministers after the conclusion of the current parliament session to seek their views in formulating a separate food processing policy,” Sahai said.
He was speaking at a workshop on “New Perspectives in Research and Development in the Food Processing Sector”, jointly organised by the ministry and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).
“Our ministry will also chart out a roadmap for scaling up R&D activities in the sector.”
The proposed new policy would lay special emphasis on private-public partnership (PPP) for giving a commercial orientation to R&D activities in the sector, Sahai said.
“It will turn the spotlight on technical capacity building for research with the ultimate aim of increasing the processing of perishables from the 2007-08 level of 10 percent to 20 percent by 2015 and raise value addition (of agricultural produce) from 25 percent to 35 percent,” he added.
According to him, R&D in food processing was vital for several areas like development of new cost-effective technologies for preservation and packaging of food products, development of innovative products using new technologies and use of energy-efficient processing.
Sahai added that another major target of his ministry was to create 500,000 women entrepreneurs in the food processing sector.
Stating that special emphasis would be given to training farmers and other stakeholders, he said: “Our effort would be to train and empower five lakh (500,000) women entrepreneurs. There are around 550 parliamentary constituencies in the country and our effort would be to train 1,000 women from each parliamentary constituency.”
The minister added that the wastage of agricultural produce has been brought down from Rs.580 billion to Rs.500 billion.
“It is regrettable that at a time when the entire world was concerned about food security, India was wasting 50 percent of its food due to lack of food processing capabilities,” Sahai said.
FICCI secretary general Amit Mitra called for launching a collective endeavour in R&D in the food processing sector.
K. Rajeswara Rao, joint secretary at the food processing ministry, gave details of the ministry’s action plan for R&D.
These include: treating R&D as a priority area, industry’s participation to ensure demand-driven R&D projects and a coordinated approach towards R&D among research institutes, universities, entrepreneurs, farmers and other stakeholders.
In the workshop, two technical sessions were held followed by a panel discussion. Key stakeholders from academia and the industry shared their experience in R&D work and also discussed opportunities and bottlenecks in such work.