By KUNA
Brussels : India is to play a bigger role in world markets in agriculture products in the future. India is forecast to consolidate its position among the worlds leading exporters of rice.
Currently it is the second largest rice producer after China and the third largest net-exporter after Thailand and Vietnam. That is one of the conclusions of the latest MAP (Monitoring Agri-trade Policy) on India published by the European Commission Wednesday.
However, the report notes that agriculture plays an important, though declining role in the economy of India. Its share in overall GDP fell from 30 percent in the early nineties, to below 17.5 percent in 2006 .
India is the world leader in such specialist products as buffalo milk, spices and bananas, mangoes, chickpeas etc., which are important in the Indian diet and are also exported. India is the fifth largest cultivator of biotech crops in the world, ahead of China. ‘ In 2006, about 3.8 million hectares of land were cultivated with genetically modified crops, by about 2.3 million farmers. The main GM crop is Bt Cotton, which was introduced in 2002.
Indian agricultural exports totalled USD 9.3 billion in the year 2005 while imports were worth roughly USD 5.5 billion.
The value of agricultural exports from the EU to India is only about 250 million euro, while the EU imports 1.3 billion euro worth of agri-food products from India. In 2004-2006 wheat was the EUs top agricultural export to India, valued at 40 million euro and accounting for 16 percent of exports. Scotch whisky exports were worth Euro 32 million, around 13 percent of exports. Cashew nuts, coffee, rice, castor oil and tea account for 43 percent of the value of the EUs imports from India .