Crashing veggie prices put vendors in a quandary

Sources said that initially vendors hoarded vegetables due to lockdown uncertainties for good returns, but the government allowed farmers to carry out agricultural activities enabling harvest of vegetables and their movement.

Though the vendors were allowed to procure vegetables from the farms directly, the number of customers had reduced owing to several restrictions. Thus, the vendors who had stocked the vegetables were forced to sell them so that they could avoid huge loss.

“The arrival of vegetables is huge and the customers entry are restricted. We sell only 25 per cent of vegetables against our regular sales,” said K Veerapandian, a vendor at Uzhavar Sandhai being operated at Central bus stand in Tiruchy.

“We cannot stock the vegetables for more than four days. The government allows us to sell from 6 am to 1 pm. But now-a-days, we complete our sale even by 10 am and beyond that, no customer turns up,” he said.

The prices of the vegetables have also fallen to half of what it was before the lockdown. “This is probably the vendors do not want to take risk by procuring huge quantity. The more we procure, the more the loss and so we limit the procurement,” said another vendor V Suresh.

Meanwhile, the farmers claimed that their production is as usual and fearing of vegetables perishing, they harvest and use it as cattle feed these days. “Let our produces be helpful to our cattle at least,” said Sundaramurthy, a farmer from Vayalur in Tiruchy.

A farmer from Thanjavur donated 1.80 tonnes of banana harvested from his field to the patients undergoing treatment at the COVID-19 isolation ward in Thanajvur Medical College Hospital on Tuesday.

It is said, there are as many as 46 persons being treated for COVID-19 infection in Thanjavur Medical College Hospital while more than 100 are quarantined at various locations, including the government engineering college in Sengipatti and the officials need at least 800 bananas every day to distribute to the patients undergoing treatment.

Hearing on the requirement, Mathiazhagan (49), Thanjavur district president of Banana Farmers Association, who had harvested the crop in his field had donated them to the officials on Tuesday. He had donated 1.80 tonnes of banana and they were stocked at the cold storage in Thanjavur Regulatory Market. Collector Govinda Rao felicitated the farmer Mathiazhagan.

While speaking to reporters, Mathiazhagan said, since the lockdown, no trader approached the farmers for procuring the crops and so they perish in the field itself and he thought of donating them in a fruitful way and so he had harvested the crops in the entire field and donated them to the patients.