Excerpts of the speech of Mr.D.Hegde, President, UPASI at the UPASI/KPA Coffee Conference held on 27th September 2012 at Bangalore coinciding with the 54th Annual General Meeting of the Karnataka Planters' Association (KPA)

摘要

It is a pleasure and honour for me to be amongst you all. I wish to extend a warm welcome to all delegates for joining us today at the UPASI-KPA Conference which brings together key players in this important agro industry.Let me take a little time focussing on a few contemporary issues that confront our sector. On developmental schemes implemented for coffee, UPASI has been highlighting umpteen times that differentiating the plantation sector by size of holding and by ownership pattern would lead to a haphazard development to the sector. Such segmentation of sector, no doubt has a bearing on proposed planting pattern to suit the technological adoption of tackling labour scarcity besides seriously undermining the productquality. The corporate sector inthe coffee industry is mainly a small companies which are family owned and were formed originally to prevent fragmentation of holdings. These companies are now mostly managed by the third generation of the original promoters. If the benefits of the scheme like those for replantation is given to corporate also, I strongly believe that rapid replanting can take place which will replace the large portion of the senile bushes thereby increasing productivity. UPASI-KPA's repeated plea on this, I hope would be considered positively and it is my fervent believe that this issue would be addressed holistically in the XII Plan Schemes.