India's Agricultural Exports: Some Challenges

The agricultural sector has been playing a key role in the composition of Indian exports. This paper highlights the surprising fact that the share of Indian agricultural exports has been slowly declining in recent years. In the era of globalization, the agricultural exports from India have been facing many internal and external challenges. Its share has declined from 18.2% in 1998-99 to 13.5% in 2000-01 and further reduced to 11.7% in 2002-03. It points out that India's share of exports in tea and mate, tobacco, sugar and molasses has been slowly declining in the global market. Inspite of many hurdles, coffee, rice, fish and preparations have been entering the global market by raising their shares. This study concludes that the production bottlenecks like cost diseconomies, poor quality and increasing domestic demand are the major hurdles to the Indian agricultural exports on the domestic front. Apart from this, declining world demand, competition from other countries, threat from substitutes, etc., are the major external constraints to Indian agricultural exports. The authors suggest that the increase in the supply of agricultural products, diversification of agricultural exports, quality improvement, improvement of the cold storage facilities for the highly perishable agricultural exports, timely delivery of goods etc., are very crucial for the maximization of agricultural exports. Above all, the government has to take some timely measures through some reforms in its EXIM policy, to fulfill the needs of the exporters of agricultural products