‘For far too long we have treated the Agriculture Ministry as a Social Welfare Ministry’ - Dr Reddy

‘For far too long we have treated the Agriculture Ministry as a Social Welfare Ministry’.

This was highlighted by the Minister for Agriculture Dr Mahendra Reddy while launching the commercial agriculture initiative in Savusavu earlier this week.

He says people have really undervalued agriculture’s potential to be the backbone of the economy and they are now turning the shift towards this critical objective of assisting the national interest.

Dr. Reddy says the national interest is to get the country to grow and to ensure that we develop.

He says in the growth process, everyone should participate and in doing so, everyone will benefit, everyone benefits if the economy grows because we want everyone to be engaged in the growth process.

Dr Reddy says the trick of the trade is that when everyone is engaged in the growth process then everyone will benefit from the returns from the growth and the sector that has huge potential is the agriculture sector.

He says the agriculture sector is within our control and it is a sector like tourism, remittances all these sectors are doing extremely well and are very important for the country but these sectors are highly volatile.

Dr Reddy says the volatility of income from these sectors will translate to the volatility of national income if we don’t let other sectors be part of the growth and development process.

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