: Heres How GI Tagging 400 Million Alphonso Mangoes Will Boost Farmer Incomes #IndiaNEWS #Farming “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet!� Thus wrote

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Heres How GI Tagging 400 Million Alphonso Mangoes Will Boost Farmer Incomes #IndiaNEWS #Farming
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet!�
Thus wrote William Shakespeare in his immortal play Romeo and Juliet. What the bard didn’t know is that the farmers of Konkan belt — Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg, Thane, Palghar and Raigad of Maharashtra famous for Alphonso mangoes, very vociferously and categorically disagree with him.
“No. Our Alphonso isn’t the same as others,’’ strongly asserts Chandu Muley, a mango farmer of this region. He adds, “Our Alphonso is unique, special and different. You buy our ripe mangoes, leave them in one room for an hour, close the door and when you re-enter you will be filled with the unique fragrance of the fruit. You will never find this aroma in any other!’’
Most mango farmers from here would agree.
Alphonso mango farms in Maharashtra
Dr Vivek Bhide, chairperson, Konkan Alphonso Mango Producers and Sellers Cooperative Association and a practising medical professional from Ganapatipule, who also owns a mango orchard with 1,500 trees in Ratnagiri, says, “For the last couple of years, under the name of Alphonso, Indian markets are getting flooded with many national and international variants of mangoes such as the ones from Malawi of South-Eastern Africa and many neighbouring states of Maharashtra. As a result, both customers and our farmers are getting duped. �
Elaborating further he explains that some farmers take the saplings from Konkan nurseries and grow them in other regions. Their fruits appear the same but differ as every plant is indigenous to the place it originates from. When the time comes to sell, these outsiders flood the market by selling their fruits at a much lesser price, which hurts the Alphonso mango farmers.
To retain their unique identity and get the correct price, mango farmers and farmer organisations of this region joined hands and got the GI (Geographical Identity) tag for Konkan Alphonso mangoes in October 2018.
This is not the first mango variety in India to get the advantage of GI tag. Others like the Malihabadi Dashehari from Uttar Pradesh, the Banaganapalle from Andhra Pradesh, the Appemidi from Karnataka, the Fazli, Himsagar and Laxman Bhog from West Bengal, the Jardalu from Bihar and the Gir Kesar from Gujarat are other varieties that have already got the advantage of GI-tags. It took nearly a decade to get the GI-tag for Alphonsos and the process was started by Dr Bhide.
Not So ‘Aam’

Alphonso mango orchards are spread over 200 kms in the Konkan belt of the state. That’s more than 1. 8 lakh hectares of land, measuring up to nearly 6 per cent of the mango region in the country.

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