The Ground Beneath Our Feet…
The news this week has not improved for Goa’s iron ore industry. On Wednesday, a Supreme Court Bench received 73 interlocutory applications filed by mining firms seeking a stay on the court’s ban order, but passed no order by way of relief or relaxation. In fact the Bench did not grant requests for an interim order to lift already dug out ore stacked at jetties. It did not either accede to requests to stay proceedings going on in twenty cases filed against miners before the National Green Tribunal.
Now posted to July after the vacation ends for the court, the Goa matter is not likely to come up anytime earlier. With the Supreme Court ban imposed in September, it marks the first entire season that has seen mining completely shut down in Goa. All avenues to restart the sector have failed thus far. A delegation that went to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to seek early resumption of mining, got an assurance, but with the matter before the Supreme Court, the status quo prevails.
On another front the mining association has recently made the point that the China market, that once lifted nearly 80 per cent of Goa’s cheaper low grade ore, had begun to fill its supply gap from Goa with imports from other countries, notably Australia and Brazil. A prolonged ban is seeing Goa and India losing its market in China, the mining sector has claimed. Their argument is that markets that have taken decades to cultivate and nurture are beginning to shift to other suppliers since the ban in Goa and the slump of exports from India have dropped from 100 million metric tonnes annually to less than 10 million metric tonnes in recent times.
For Goa, the silver lining is that the stoppage of the over-worked industry that has cast a devastating environmental footprint on the State has allowed farming in the hinterland areas to sputter back to life. Local labour in transport and machinery that once flocked to mining with its quick returns has since returned to cultivate their fields, with manymore expected to follow this coming agricultural season. The renewed vigour in agriculture and dairy farming may just be one of the positives to come out of the entire mining mess.
The steady rise in fruit, vegetable and dairy prices due to Goa’s dependence on suppliers from outside the State, and the India-wide food price rise, is seemingly generating a welcome impetus to Goa’s agriculturists. The recent launch of a new tie up between hotels and farm suppliers in South Goa to directly market fresh local produce to hotels via websites is the kind of positive intervention that can create new synergies, as long as pricing is respected, unhealthy competition is kept at bay, and the venture sustains over time. The region was once exceedingly interested in farming, but quick returns from mining, tourism and real estate proved to be the lure that saw a decline in farming, combined with several other economic factors, including the indiscriminate creation of government jobs and transfer of land ownership, with beneficiaries of the latter two going most often to the same political vote base.
Already the formation of farmer’s clubs, organic farming and the overall upmarket trends in some food and its cultivation, indicates that farming seems poised to return as the new style statement. It may be early days yet, but Goa could well convert crippling dependence into an intelligent economic revival. It may not generate the surpluses for its entrepreneurs to buy fancy yachts, but at least the ground beneath our feet will still be in Goa and not somewhere in China.
