A committee headed by Agriculture State Minister Wasantha Aluwihare was appointed to look into the issues faced by big onion and potato farmers to implement a special mechanism to protect them, Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera said.
The Minister stressed the importance of having a proper plan to protect the farmers. The big onion farmers in the Matale, Jaffna and Puttlam districts and the Potato farmers in Bandarawela and Nuwara Eliya are inconvenienced since they cannot sell their produce at a good price. If farmers want to sell their products, they must go to marketplace without depending on middlemen, he said. But in our country, racketeers and profiteers are taking farmers’ produce. The Minister said that it was important to limit or temporally suspend the importation of big onions and potatoes and increase taxes imposed on those imports during the harvest season.
The Ministry has already decided to purchase 7,000 metric tonnes of seed onion from the local farmers, Ministerial sources said.
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