Plan underway to ramp up vegetable oil production

 ​Hyderabad: Indian Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR) and Indian Institute of Oilseeds Research (IIOR) will hold a two-day seminar to come up with a roadmap for setting up vegetable oil production in the country by 2020.  In a press release IIOR Director A Vishnu Vardhan Reddy said Indian vegetable oil economy is heavily dependent on imports, despite the record production, due to up-surging and bulky nature of its domestic requirement. 

Several efforts are being expedited at various levels to reduce the vegetable oil imports and thereby reducing the burden on national's exchequer and achieving stability and self-sufficiency in vegetable oils. 

However, translation from precepts to practice requires contour-defining strategies and tradable roadmap that integrate the efforts of all the stakeholders into a single confluence. In turn, this needs developing a comprehensive and strategic roadmap to reduce the huge gap between vegetable oil demand and its production in the country.

It was against this backdrop that the ICAR-IIOR decided to host a National Seminar on "Road Map for Vegetable Oil Production by 2022", under the aegis of the Oilseeds Division of Department of Agriculture, Co-operation and Farmers' Welfare (DAC&FW), Government of India. The two-day-long seminar will be held on April 28-29, 2018 at the University Auditorium, Professor Jayashankar  Telangana State Agricultural University (PJTSAU), Hyderabad.  

Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Radha Mohan Singh will inaugurate the event. About 500 participants drawn from various stakeholder organisations, including State governments implementing the Mini Mission -I, II and II related to centrally-sponsored programmes and schemes in the vegetable oil sector, central agencies, ICAR institutes, oilseed industries, progressive farmers, and senior officials of DAC&FW, he added.

During the event a series of activities including, seminars, discussions, exhibitions and so on will be organised. Also, about fifty exhibition stalls by various sectors of vegetable oils like equipment manufacturers, processors, marketing agencies, devilment agencies, value chain agencies, etc. will be displaying products and showcasing the state-of-art technologies and innovations for creating awareness among the stakeholders, he added.