It is true that the price fluctuation in Coconut is unmanageable and mostly affect the farming group economically. It is more so in the case of small and marginal farm size Coconut farmers whose livelihood solely dependent on income from Coconut as is the case with Coconut farmers of East Coast of Tamil Nadu state of India. The Tamil Nadu Government has announced a minimum support price based solution to the problem by which the farmers are required to value add to convert their produce into Copra and sell it in procurement centers supported by the Government. However, this solution looks in practice not easily adoptable for the following reasons.
1) There is no inbuilt collective action that will ensure empowerment of farmers for collective supervision and bargaining in the forward linkage of the mechanism. To derive benefit from coconut farming ( or for the matter of fact farming with any crop) the farmers have to have a collective action or otherwise exploitation can not be avoided.
2)Price fluctuation is in the Indian farmers sense is nothing but exploitation whether it is done intentionally or by a system of market force
The answer lies in this slogan - Egg price fluctuates but not the omlet price; Coconut price fluctuates but not coconut oil price.
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