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Crop advisory body, the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), has recommended that farmers should be encouraged to adopt pest and disease resistant sugarcane varieties along with integrated pest management (IPM) strategies to overcome the challenges of pests and disease infestations.
Sugarcane cultivation has been facing increasing thereat from pest and disease infestations in the recent years and the previous cropping season witnessed the flare up of red rot and top borer attacks on popular variety like Co 0238, hurting yields.
In its non-price recommendation for the price policy for sugarcane for the 2025-26 season, the CACP recommended that awareness campaigns should be conducted to educate farmers about improved varieties and IPM techniques, ensuring wider adoption and sustainable sugarcane farming practices. It also observed that a significant gap exists between the demand and availability of quality seed cane, which hampers productivity, sugar recovery and profitability. To address this issue, coordinated efforts by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), State Agricultural Universities (SAUs), State Governments and sugar mills are essential.
“The focus should be on enhancing the varietal replacement rate and seed replacement rate, along with developing climate-resilient, pest- and disease-resistant sugarcane varieties. Particular emphasis should be placed on varieties with high sucrose content to improve profitability for both farmers and sugar industry,” CACP said.
The Government recently increased the Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP) for the 2025-26 sugar season to ₹355 per quintal, about 4.4 per cent higher than last year, based on the recommendations of CACP.
Further, CACP recommended that to promote mechanisation in sugarcane cultivation, the sugar mills should help in the setting up of Custom Hiring Centers (CHCs) and support Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) and entrepreneurs to provide access to high-cost machinery, such as harvesters and planting equipment, on a rental basis.
“Collaborative efforts involving ICAR-Indian Institute of Sugarcane Research (IISR), ICAR-Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering (CIAE), IIT’s, etc. should focus on designing affordable and efficient sugarcane harvesters suited to Indian conditions,” it said. The Commission also recommended that special budget allocation should be made for sugarcane mechanisation under the Sub-Mission on Agricultural Mechanisation (SMAM)..
The Commission reiterated that the State Advised Price (SAP) system should be discontinued as it distorts sugar markets, puts financial burden on sugar mills and does not incentivise improvements in sugar recovery rates. Some States such as Haryana, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh announce SAP, which is often higher than the FRP.
“Higher SAP puts financial burden on sugar mills and distorts market. Unlike the FRP, SAP is not linked to sugar recovery rate and does not provide incentive for higher recovery and efficiency. It is worth mentioning that in Uttar Pradesh, with improvement in sugar recovery rate, the gap between SAP and FRP at State-specific recovery rate has narrowed, while divergence between SAP and FRP is quite large in Punjab, Haryana and Uttarakhand due to rising SAP and low sugar recovery rates,” it observed.
CACP recommended that SAP should be discontinued and the States should adopt FRP/Revenue Sharing Formula (RSF) system. “If a State opts to retain SAP, the difference between SAP and FRP should be directly paid to farmers through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) to avoid financial stress on sugar mills,” CACP said.
Published on May 9, 2025
This article first appeared on The Hindu Business Line
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