Manipur’s most prized Pineapple Festival kicks off at the Thambalnu Market Complex, Andro in Manipur’s Imphal east district on Thursday with as many as 115 farmers participating in the gala event that is promoted as a buyers and sellers meet cum youth festival.

“The core idea of the festival is to make the farmers of Manipur self-sufficient in term of food and make Manipur an enterprising state by exploiting its agricultural potential,” said the state’s Forest, Horticulture & Soil Conservation minister, Th. Shyamkumar who represents the Andro Kendra as well as the founder president of the Development organization Andro Kendra (DOAK), the civil society who in collaboration with the North East Council (NEC) organized this year’s Pineapple festival.

Justifying the festival, conceived as an event to promote the pineapple farmers, the Horticulture minister revealed that both national and international buyers who have attended in the festival and participated in the buyers and sellers meet had started airlifting pineapples from Manipur. “Not only pineapple, ginger produced in Pherzawl district is being airlifted in bulk so much as that you can’t buy Pherzawl ginger in Manipur even if you wanted to. On Saturday itself, lifting of pineapples from the state will start,” revealed the minister.

Even though pineapple farmers complained of the scanty rain affecting their crop output, pineapple farmers see the 12^th edition of the fruit festival as opportunity to make whatever investment they had made count.

Thoibi Yumnam, the farmer who won the best pineapple farmer’s award for maximum crop last year, who said that her produce has gone down this year due to poor rain endorsed the pineapple festival as festival for the farmers. “Before the festival, there was no proper market. So the only option was to go to Imphal and sell the fruit. Now because of the festival, we don’t have to do to Imphal anymore. We can sell our produce to the DOAK run food processing unit easily,” remaked the award winner farmer.

DOAK secretary, L Dogendro Singh told KRC Times that the pineapple festival which started a mela in 2007 has grown in stature and strength looking into the problem of the farmers. He said the problem of marketing of pineapples faced by the farmers has been mitigated completely.  “Before marketing the pineapples was a big problem.

Pineapples ripe during the rains. Immediately after the rain, it ripens and because of marketing constrains, lot of fruits use to get wasted. June-July is the pineapple season and these months are usually plagued with state wide bandh. Now after DOAK, under the leadership of the hon’ble minister who is also the founder president of DOAK, things have improved a lot. We have a cold storage installed at the cost of Rs 80 lakhs. And with help from other departments, we have started a food processing unit, bringing out pineapple juice. This has taken care of the marketing problem of the farmers who supply in bulk to the processing unit without any worries,” said the Dogendro Singh.

The 4-day festival with feature routine buyer-seller meet as well as experts from horticulture department will interact with farmers and sensitize them of organic pineapple farming and how to grow pineapples profitable. Besides the knowledge share programmes, each day of the festival will be brought alive with entertainment programmes with the crowning of the Miss Pineapple as the grand finale. Like the last edition the pineapple farmers will be awarded based on the quantity and quality of crops in the concluding day on 7^th July.