Rachid Benaissa Pledges Tax Rebates To Farmers To Spur National Potato Production

Agriculture Minister Rachid Benaissa has pledged to enforce a string of localized tax rebates for the benefit of Algerian farmers with a view to clearing the way for a hike in national production of potatoes at the earliest possible time.

• Speaking to journalists at the opening of the 4^th International Potato Exhibition in the city of Mostaganem in western Algeria, Mr Rachid Benaissa said that such tax incentive measures would doubtless encourage potato-producers and secondary breeders to raise their production and bring the soaring price of potato down nationwide as a result.
• After a production of 29.5 million hundred kilos in 2009/2010, Algeria yearns to reach the 40 million hundred kilos in the shortest time, he said.
• For this purpose, Algeria has extended potato plantation surfaces, has introduced performing mechanisms and adopted the large-scale irrigation (pivots, sprayings), in addition to a sound logistic of transportation and cold storage, Mr Rachid Benaissa added.
• HM Communication and the Green Algérie Magazine organise on 15th, 16th and 17th May 2012 « Batatis Mosta 2012 », the 4rd International Potato Exhibition, in the Mostaganem Riding School (Algeria).
• The event is being held on a surface of 8 hectares with more than 110 exhibitors from all ranges of the potato field (producers, secondary breeders, agro-suppliers, mechanization, services, purchasers, transformers and processors…).
• Mostaganem is in the heart of the producing basin with more than 80% of the potato national production “with Ain-Defla, Chlef, Mascara and Maghnia.”
• 90% of the potato seeds imports go through the Mostaganem port.
• Nurserymen and laboratories will also take part in the Mostaganem event because of the significant needs of seeds, assessed to more than one hundred thirty thousand tones (130 000 T).
• Varieties trial plots will be laid out for the visitors. Specialised communications are also planned.
• Over the past three weeks, the price of potatoes on the Algerian market tripled from 40 to 120 dinars as snow coverage has affected crops and venal speculators have exploited the situation.

• Average annual prices went from 50 dinars per kilo in 2007 to 35 dinars in 2008, 43 dinars in 2009, 36 dinars in 2010 and 39 dinars in 2011.

• The agriculture ministry explained that the weather “pushed the end-of-season harvest back by 40 days”.

• “This rise is continuing because the harvest hasn’t fully begun yet. This has been factored into the price of the product by some producers who supply the market with small quantities before the harvest begins in earnest,” the ministry claimed.

• The total area sown at the end of the 2010-11 season is the same as that sown in the previous season, 55,000 hectares, of which nearly 5,000 hectares were devoted to early produce.

• Hadj Ladjali, the president of the Chamber of Agriculture in the province of Ain Defla, which is one of the country’s main potato-growing areas along with Mostaganem, Mascara and El Oued, said that frantic speculators had exploited the bad weather to keep prices high.

• “The current rises in the prices of potatoes, which are one of the most widely consumed agricultural products in Algeria, is due to speculation during a lean period between the end of the late autumn harvest and this season’s harvest, which takes place from mid-April to mid-June,” he explained.

• “Now we’re in a slack period, with a big imbalance in the market due to the absence of the early crop from Mostaganem, where the crop growth cycle was greatly delayed by the bad weather in February,” he added.

• However, the trend should reverse at the end of this month according to the spokesman of the General Union of Algerian Traders and Artisans (UGCAA), Hadj Tahar Boulenouar, who said at the beginning of this week that potato prices will fall by 40 per cent because “large quantities of potatoes from the regions of Mostaganem, Relizane, Ain Defla and the coastline will begin to be collected from the end of this month onwards and then put on sale.”

• He added that efforts are being made to “organise distribution, stabilize prices and protect people’s purchasing power” and blamed the sudden price rise on a “production shortfall due to the recent bad weather which affected the quantity and quality of harvests.”

• Agriculture Minister Rachid Benaissa said that importing potatoes would not counteract the price rises, and worse still, there was “a risk that it will affect the whole industry”.

• As he explained to journalists, studies have shown that the price of imported potatoes would be somewhere between 70 and 75 dinars per kilo.

• “This price is not competitive enough to beat the market price, and what’s more, imported potatoes are of lower quality because they have been stored for six months,” Mr Benaissa said.

• “Quantities of potatoes are coming onto the market every day and prices should get back to normal by the end of May when the harvest reaches its seasonal peak,” the Agriculture Minister concluded.