TUESDAY, MAY 07, 2024
A crucial crop
News reports say that the government plans to undertake a large exercise to ‘insure’ some 100,000 coconut trees in Goa. The logic seems to be that owners could pay under a couple of rupees per tree, and get paid Rs 1,200 if the palm dies.
Coconut is undoubtedly a crucial crop for Goa. Researchers say the first organised coconut plantations in Goa might be 3,000 years old. A coconut tree is believed to yield 400 to 500 litres of toddy a year, out of which one can extract 18 bottles of vinegar. Microbiologist Dr Nandkumar Kamat says on a single 15 to 20 year-old coconut tree, he could count over 1200 species—bacteria, fungi, lichens, insects, arboreal mammals and birds.
And yet, Goa has been long treating the coconut tree with step-motherly attention. Coconut trees have not been defined as ‘trees’ under the local Tree Act, because of the manner in which the law goes about its definitions. Whether the Tree Act protects or just harasses those who plant trees is another issue altogether.
Likewise, the lack of protection to coconut trees is another major issue. Poor prices, night-time thefts, low productivity, the lack of coconut-plucking labour, and the poor spread of simple mechanical devices that could reduce the drudgery from the field, are many issues which the State needs to tackle first, if we are to see a difference being made to Goa’s most visible tree.
Yet this was not always the case. Coconut was treated with importance in Goa of the past. Centuries ago, the Jesuits devoted much attention to the coconut’s culture, and even produced a valuable treatise on the subject called ‘Arte Palmarica’. A lay brother in Salcete is said to have authored the Arte Palmarica which recorded his research notes on the yields of different types of coconuts. Coconuts are said to have once formed the principal export of Goa, if one goes by a report in The Dublin Review.
To see things in context, the State is now talking about insurance for a hundred thousand—or one lakh—coconut trees. Way back in 1954, there were an estimated 2.3 million trees in Goa.
But local produce like coconut or crops like mango hardly gets reflected in State GDP figures. So it becomes easy to ignore and neglect. Even as the mango season nears, we need to look at the loss we’re creating, by neglecting the traditional crops of Goa. Even a cursory look will underline the importance of the mango.
Mango goes into pickles, chutneys, salads and raitas, mango rice or even gravies and dals. Some 22 types of desert can be made from mango, and 15 types of chutneys and sauces. Kulfi, curd-sweet, ice-cream, pudding and jam too, as a book published in Goa tells us. India has rich mango diversity; eighteenth century visitors rated the Goa mango to be among the largest, most delicious, wholesome and best tasted.
History tells us that the Portuguese sent mangoes to Delhi in the sixteenth century to obtain favours from Moghul emperors and their influential nawabs. The Bhonsles of Sawantwadi were engaged in a similar mango-diplomacy. Goa’s Portuguese governors would send baskets of mangoes to the Peshwas of Pune too.
If we are to protect and promote the crops that have played such an important role in Goa’s past, then obviously creative thinking is necessary. Insurance might offer a slight financial cushion—if at all. But it could end up as another controversial scheme, just as the way Mediclaim does offer some immediate relief, but does not actually build up the health infrastructure of Goa. (Questions are also being asked about which hospitals Mediclaim patients from Goa get sent to, and whether the most efficient hospitals are actually selected.)
Coconut needs creative thinking; not just insurance.
