Assocham members D.S. Rawat (centre) with M.G. Verma (left) and Ombeer S. Tyagi release a study on Odisha’s agro and food processing opportunities in Bhubaneswar on Tuesday. Picture by Sanjib Mukherjee

Bhubaneswar, Feb. 28: The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) Cluster Development Foundation has proposed to adopt two districts of Odisha for setting up food and agri processing clusters in collaboration with the state government here.

These clusters, supported by the Centre and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), will be modelled after its initiatives in Bengal, Bihar, and Jammu and Kashmir.

“An Unido team shall be in India in the first week of March,” said Ravi Wig, chairman of the Assocham’s Odisha Development Council, while addressing a news conference here today.

“The Odisha government must aggressively invest in upgrading the agri infrastructure and offer tax exemptions, lucrative incentives, schemes and subsidies to encourage investments from leading players in the food processing sector,” he said, releasing the Assocham study titled “Orissa: A Rising Investment Destination for Agro and Food Processing”.

“Lack of cold storage, warehousing facilities, food testing labs and use of primitive technology together with inadequate knowledge among farmers and entrepreneurs are the prime reasons behind impending growth of Odisha’s food processing industry,” said the chamber’s national secretary general D.S. Rawat.

Assocham will hold the “Food Processing Investment Summit: Market Development and Business Opportunities” in Cuttack on Wednesday to explore the possibilities in Odisha’s food processing sector.

The Assocham study revealed that most of the land in Odisha was owned by small and marginal farmers practising subsistence agriculture who hardly had any access to market. Besides, low level of capital formation and low availability of credit were significantly adding to the farmers’ woes, the study stated.