Receipt of Letters of Interest (LoT) from as many as 12 companies including three MNCs  for the proposed Mega Food Park at Banderdewa shows that a considerable amount of interest has been generated among the entrepreneur fraternity both from and outside state. The project has created a lot of hope since, if it ultimately emerges as a success story, Arunachal’s untapped horticultural and also agricultural potential to a good extent will find a new route of attaining commercial objectives. With levels of expectations rising particularly among the state’s farming community, it’s time to intensify all efforts in a proactive and prolonged manner so that bottlenecks, if any are erased and investors feel the maximum ease of doing business.
It has been spoken at various by various experts time and again that due to nature’s blessings that comes through soil and climate, Arunachal’s economy can catapult to much prosperous levels through horticulture alone. If this is all true, when it comes to the state’s position in terms of the national market penetration, it has been a rather disheartening story so far. The horticulture farmers of Arunachal toil hard and even with minimal scientific interventions of farming and based mostly on traditional knowledge inherited as legacy, produces varieties of A-1 quality fruits. But, it’s a fact that major consumer segments of the country have little opportunities of tasting these delicacies in raw, leave alone any food preparations made out of them. The only reason for this is lack of access to markets and the much required market intelligence has also remained out of reach of a major portion of the state’s farmers. This leads to a considerable amount of wastage and lack of food processing units and modern storage facilities only aggravate the situation. Despite all these shortcomings, successes achieved by a handful of state’s progressive farmers is enough to conclude that this can be taken to a large scale if there is a constant governmental patronage.
Even if the Mega Food Park can be turn out to be a good beginning in the direction to tap the true agri-horti potential of Arunachal, its long term success will depend much on a host of allied yet intrinsically linked aspects such as uninterrupted availability electricity, cold storage, packaging, R&D labs etc. A snap in any of these will result in loss of investors’ confidence and earning of bad name for the state.
Given the state’s level of produce, it can be said without thinking twice that at least a few more can come up at any point of time. All these can really happen, if this Mega Food Park becomes successful as an investors’ confidence earner. In any case, state government should take it up as a mega task.

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Kenter Joya Riba

(Managing Editor)
      She is a graduate in Science with post graduation in Sociology from University of Pune. She has been in the media industry for nearly a decade. Before turning to print business, she has been associated with radio and television.
Email: kenterjoyaz@easternsentinel.in / editoreasternsentinel@gmail.com
Phone: 0360-2212313

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