Soaring potato prices have returned to haunt farmers and average consumers this summer again. Unlike last year when the crisis was caused by surplus production, the blame this season is being thrust on blight — a dreaded plant disease that ruins the crop.

But even as the state government is struggling to tackle the situation, the real problem apparently lies with the cold storage owners.

Estimates show that as much as 40 per cent of the potato crop in Bengal has been wrecked by blight. A closer look at the sequence of events, however, only shows that it’s the cold storage owners who are hoarding potatoes and manipulating demand in the market. The effect has precipitated into a crisis, with panic-stricken farmers going for distress sale and consumers facing abnormally high prices at the local markets.

The directorate of state agriculture department has revealed that the potato production this year has been around 60 lakh tonnes. Out of that lot, a whopping 33 lakh tonnes are stacked up in 402 cold storages spread across the state. The situation is eerily similar to what happened last year — when out of the total produce of 99 lakh tonnes, around 55 lakh tonnes of potatoes were held up in cold storages, leading to a demand-price crisis.

This year, while 33 lakh tonnes potatoes are locked up in cold storages, the remaining 27 lakh tonnes are learnt to be rotting away with the state government having no system in place to store the entire produce.

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