agriculture sector subsidy & food processing section 8 MCQ Questions & Answers Detailed Explanation

Answer: (c)

The Food Corporation of India (FCI) was set up in 1965. Its objectives are Effective price support operations for safeguarding the interests of the farmers.

Distribution of food grains throughout the country for the public distribution system and maintaining a satisfactory level of operational and buffer stocks of foodgrains to ensure National Food Security.

Answer: (c)

Agriculture and Allied sectors contribute less than 20% around 17% of Gross Domestic product of India. Around 60% of net sown agricultural area of India is depended on rainfall.

Answer: (d)

As the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee Acts (APMC) enacted by States did not allow wholesale trade through private mandis and exploited the farmers and consumers both, Central Govt. in April 2017 got a Model Agriculture Produce and Livestock Marketing (APLM) Act 2017 drafted and circulated to States to implement.

Following are the important features:

• Allow private wholesale mandis (rather than just govt mandis in wholesale trade) Allow godowns, warehouses and cold storages to act as markets (this means that earlier they were not allowed to purchase from farmers in bulk and now they can act as private wholesale mandis and can procure in bulk from farmers)
• The model act has also proposed to cap mandi fees (2% for fruits and vegetables and 1% for food grains, this is charged by the mandi operators for the maintenance of mandi)
• Farmers can now directly sell to big retailers (through contract farming)

Answer: (a)

Targeted PDS (TPDS) means targeting the PDS to the poor. This system started when the procurement and issue prices of PDS items saw a rise with the ushering in of economic reforms in the 1990s.

Answer: (d)

The provisional data for the 20th Livestock Census 2018 was released in Oct 2019 by the Dept. of Animal Husbandry and Dairying under the “Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying”.

As per the data, West Bengal has the largest number of cattle (in the previous census UP had the largest cattle population) and Tamil Nadu has the largest number of poultry. Livestock population increased by 4.6% over Census 2011-12.

Livestock is commonly defined as domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to produce labour and commodities such as meat, eggs, milk, fur, leather, and wool.

Livestock (major species) includes Cattle (cows & ox), Buffalo, Sheep, Goat, Pig, Mithun, Yak, Horses & Ponies, Mule, Donkey, Camel etc. which stood at 54 crores in the latest census.

Answer: (c)

NABARD is the apex institution for providing credit facilities to agricultural and rural areas.

It came into existence on July 12, 1982, and took over the functions of the erstwhile Agricultural Credit Development (ACD), Rural Planning and Credit Cell (RPCC) of RBI and the Agricultural Refinance Development Corporation (ARDC).