News
Price slide puts Kalpitiya farmers in hot water
For Kalpitiya’s radish farmers, a bumper harvest is no good news this time as prices have begun to plummet after peaking in recent months.
They said they began radish cultivation in the hope that they could make a good profit due to the rising vegetable prices in the market. But when they started harvesting, radish prices began to plummet due to a glut in the market.
The farmers said they were forced to discard their produce as they could not sell a kilo even for Rs100.
Daluwa Nirmalapura radish farmer W D Ajith Appuhamy said the price slide started a month ago and had now hit rock-bottom. “I am tending to part of my crops, hoping that the prices will improve in the coming weeks,” he said.
According to him, in the Kalpitiya peninsula, many farmers chose to cultivate radish. The crop covered a total area of more than 500 acres.
“I have cultivated about 10 acres of radish this season and I am hoping to get a harvest of nearly 400,000 kilos. In my cultivation, one radish weighs more than a kilo, some more than 500 grams. We have invested lakhs of rupees in cultivating radish. But prices have fallen to Rs100 a kilo. This is not enough to cover the investment,” Mr Appuhamy says.
Anthony Ranjan, who owns a radish plantation at Daluwa Nirmalapura, said there were no buyers for his produce as the market was flooded with radish.
Some farmers said they had donated part of the harvest to security forces.
A farm worker said, “We live and work in these plantations, but today when these plantations have no income we cannot imagine how our owners will pay our wages.”
Growers say that hundreds of thousands of rupees worth of labour-intensive crops had been left to perish.
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