The price of coconuts hit the glass ceiling in Goa this August and touched the price of a US dollar for a single nut. The Goa State Horticulture Corporation Ltd., under the leadership of Chandrahas Naik Desai, stepped in to stabilise the price by importing coconuts from Shivamogga. It did stabilise the prices but started another debate: is the Karnataka coconut as good as the coconut from Goa? The quality of the kernel is obviously different. Whether it is better or inferior is subjective because there are no organoleptic parameters set for the taste of the coconut when it is cooked.
The brand image of the coconut is important. Goa has three main cultivars of coconut, known by the name of the village where they were originally grown. South Goa has the Benaulim variety from the village next to the hitherto more famous Colva beach. There are five variants, with green or yellow nuts which may be round or elongated and an elongated red husk type. Among these five variations, the green round Benaulim coconut has been identified as the best in terms of kernel content, and the yield of oil from the copra obtained from a single tree each year. The other two varieties are Calangute, which is a distant second in terms of cultivation, and the little-known Nadora coconut variety.
Ten years ago, the sudden spurt in coconut prices during Ganesh Chaturthi would not have caught the attention of the people in Goa. Prices of commodities do rise during this festival as air fares and hotel room tariffs go up during Diwali, Christmas, New Year and Carnival time. Tourists only complain about the ‘fleecing’ by taxi drivers. No one even complains about what the Railways euphemistically call ‘dynamic pricing’. Taxi drivers are mostly semi-literate and do not have advertising budgets like the airlines, railways and hotels. It is the same issue with coconuts. They grow on trees, don’t they? So how come a locally produced nut costs so much? No one complains that the tender coconuts from Tamil Nadu and Karnataka cost above Rs 50 and sometimes as much as one hundred rupees!
The message is now getting some clarity: the coconut trees in Goa need attention. The input costs have gone up. Manuring of a single coconut tree with compost, goat pellets, rock phosphate and potash is being offered by enterprising agricultural service providers at rates ranging from Rs 450 to Rs 600 per tree. Green leaves of the Uski or Getonia floribunda are hard to find in urban areas because the neighbouring plateaus have been converted into industrial estates, housing colonies, gated communities or government offices.
Add to this the cost of harvesting each coconut tree at least four times a year at a hundred rupees per plucking, and the cost, excluding land rent, irrigation and pest management, is about rupees one thousand per tree. If one harvests five bunches of ten nuts each, the overhead cost itself is twenty rupees. When the assured support price (ASP) is fifteen rupees, the owner of the tree is actually subsidising each coconut to the tune of five rupees!
Farmers who have coconut plantations or own a kulagar have been bearing losses due to increasing input costs and the rapid decline in yields due to monkeys and langurs of all kinds. It is an issue that is growing and is likely to blow up in our faces like the issue of stray dogs. Ashok Joshi and others in Sattari have been campaigning to declare some animals as vermin. However, the animals are protected by law, the farmers are not. The rise in price is a wake-up call: the coconut growers have had enough of this nonsense. It is payback time.
The coconut palms produce toddy, or sur, which is the original source of feni in Goa. The expression ‘sur marla kitem?’ has lost its meaning because we do not drink sur (or even coconut feni) for intoxication in Goa any more. Fortunately, Hansel Vaz is working to revive the coconut feni with a little help from Shweta Gaonkar to boost toddy production. In December 2017, the Government of Goa acknowledged the demand of the people and notified in the Official Gazette that the coconut, Cocos nucifera, is the ‘State Tree’. However, like the River Saraswati and the Matti tree, Terminalia elliptica, the coconut tree may also disappear from sight and we may have to convince future generations that the coconut tree actually existed in Goa. It is time we acted now to prevent this catastrophe. Coconut is the ‘Brand Ambassador’ of Goa.
(The writer, former agricultural officer and a mentor to the GenNext organic farmers, is committed to nurturing young talent for a food-secure future)
