World Food India — a three-day event organised by the food processing ministry in India's capital — will see businesses signing memorandums of understanding worth $11 billion, the government said on Friday.
Inaugurating the event, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana, the flagship scheme of the food processing ministry, is expected to catalyse investments of $5 billion, benefit two million farmers and generate more than half a million jobs over the next three years, apart from creating world-class food processing infrastructure.
As many as 60 top executives of large multi-national corporations — including Nestle chairman Paul Bulcke, Metro Cash and Carry chief executive Peter Boone, GSK Consumer Healthcare chief executive Brian J McNamara, Unilever (food) president Amanda Sourry and Sharafuddin Sharaf of Al-Sharaf Group — attended the event. Around 7,000 stakeholders from 60 nations, 8,000 exhibitors and 75 policy makers of various countries participated the first such event on food processing, food processing minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal said.
It will facilitate some 5,000 business-to-business and business-to-government meetings. The food processing ministry has already forecast FDI inflows of $10 billion over three years.
India's horticulture sector has shown an average growth rate of 5.5 per cent annually over the last ten years, much higher than its overall farm and allied sector growth.
India is the world’s sixth-largest grocery market, worth over $600 billion, where demand for such items is expected to double in the next five years, Badal said. Since the current processing level is just 10 per cent of its production, there is immense scope for improvement.
Source: indianexpress.com