Bhadrak: Cultivation of sunflower, a cash crop, has failed to fetch dividends for hundreds of farmers in Basudevpur, Tihidi and Dhamnagar blocks in Bhadrak as they are finding it an uphill task to sell their produce in the absence of marketing facilities either at the government level or at the private level.
Staring at mounting losses that are piling up due to the sunflowers remaining unsold, the farmers have threatened to embark on an agitation.
According to reports, farmers have been forced to resort to distress sale of sunflower seeds since 2012-13. They alleged that though they have been intimating their problems to the government since then, nothing is being done to alleviate their plight.
“Our repeated complaints have yielded no results. We had apprised the district collector and the agriculture secretary of the problem that we face due to unsold seeds but nothing has been done,” they said.
Again, some sunflower farmers including Ranjan Kumar Nayak, Diptikant Rout, Brundaban Biswal, Harekrushna Behera, Anadi Rout and Prahallad Biswal lodged a complaint Tuesday with collector Gyanaranjan Das, deputy director of agriculture and secretary of Markfed.
In their complaint, the farmers said though they had harvested sunflower seeds in 2016-17, the government has not taken any steps for procurement.
Many farmers have taken loans from private moneylenders and cooperative societies and grown sunflower. They are under pressure to pay back the loans, they said. Until and unless the seeds are sold, they would not be able to pay off loans, they added.
Frustrated over the existing state of affairs, the farmers threatened they would commit suicide if their problems were not resolved at the earliest.
They set a deadline of 10 days for the government for seeds procurement. “If the government fails to take any step for seeds procurement within next 10 days, we will start an agitation,” they said.
