Growth in Indian Agriculture Export

• India is the world's largest producer across a wide range of agricultural commodities due to its favorable Agriculture climatic condition. Today, India is a major supplier of several agricultural commodities like rice, spices, cashew, oil meals, tea, coffee, fresh fruits & vegetables, meat and its preparations, and marine products to the international market.
• The share of agriculture in the gross domestic product (GDP) has reached approximately 20 percent (19.9%) for the first time in the last 17 years in the financial year 2020-2021, and it is the only sector shown positive growth during covid time clocked a positive growth of 3.4 percent.
• India’s major export destinations for agricultural products are the USA, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Bangladesh Etc. The continuous supply of agricultural commodities, especially staples like rice, wheat, pulses, and vegetables also enabled food security.
• India’s major agricultural exports include rice (both Basmati and non-basmati), cotton, spices, wheat, and India also exports marine products and buffalo meat.  
• Farm exports (Including only the agricultural products) registered 9.8% growth for the period of April-December 2020.

Reasons For Growth in Farm Exports:

• Normalization of demands
• Dry weather of different countries
• India's surplus monsoon
• Chinese stockpiling

Challenges associated with Agricultural exports:

1. Yield levels of the majority of crops in India remains lower than the world’s average due to small landholdings of an average of 1.5 hectares
2. Exporters of agriculture commodities are not such successful due to uncertainty in foreign trading regimes.
3. International prices can also restrict India’s agricultural export
4. The government’s producer-consumer bias in India’s farm policy is unfair Due to the Indian government putting export restrictions on imported food items to prevent inflationary pressures in the domestic economy which hurts Agricultural exports.

How to improve agricultural exports?

1. Infrastructure changes in the agri-supply chain such as warehouses, cold storage
2. Re-invigorating agricultural research and education, will increase lab to land connectivity. 
3. Augmenting cargo handling facilities at Ports, Airports, etc. This will reduce the waiting time (Suggested by APEDA)
4. Green channel clearance for perishable Agriculture products in toll, air, and freight cargo stations.
5. village level procurement centers that will benefit small and marginal farmers (suggested by NITI Aayog)