Acreage under guar reduced to one-third

Sushil Manav

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 23

Fall in prices impacted by cut in purchases by Shale gas producers due to fall in oil prices have resulted in a drastic fall in area under guar in the state this year.

Against the target of 3 lakh hectares set by the state Agriculture Department, acreage of guar in the state had reached barely 91,000 hectares so far, which was nearly 30 per cent of the target, said Rajiv Mishra, Deputy Director (Statistics), Agriculture Department.

Although the normal acreage of guar in the state is 3.7 lakh hectares, the department had set a relatively smaller target of 3 lakh hectares looking into disillusionment of farmers towards the crop in the past two years.

Sources said not only in Haryana, the area under guar in Rajasthan, the largest producer of the crop in the country, had also fallen by at least 40 per cent this time.

They said the decline in prices of the crop in the past two years had disenchanted farmers and many of them had opted for other alternatives such as pulses, barley etc. this year.

“The crop had failed to live up to our expectations in the past two years,” said Gurjeet Singh Mann, a progressive farmer from Kirpal Patti village of Sirsa.

Guar is grown in arid and semi-arid land and it is sown mainly in areas close to Rajasthan, such as Sirsa, Fatehabad, Hisar, Bhiwani and some other districts.

Though guar was never a main crop in the state, farmers’ interest in it increased after the 2011-12 season when the price of the crop that once sold for Rs 3,000 per quintal skyrocketed to Rs 33,000 after its use in the Shale gas production.

However, prices have been falling since then and last year, it went down to less than Rs 3,000 per quintal. Sources in the guar gum industry said the crop seed prices had fallen to the lowest level in five years after the US shale gas producers cut guar gum purchases due to dip in oil prices.