"Reactive interventions after price collapse fail farmers more than they help them." Analyse this statement in the context of Minimum Support Price/procurement mechanisms for perishable crops.

Onion, like most perishables, is not a notified MSP crop; its price is managed through Price Stabilisation Fund (PSF) buffer procurement by NAFED and NCCF alongside trade controls. Decomposed, these tools are triggered by price events rather than by the harvest calendar — and that timing gap is where farmers lose.

Anatomy of the intervention: price-triggered, not calendar-driven

• Export prohibition (8 December 2023 – 31 March 2024) answered a consumer price spike, not producer planning [1].
• On lifting, a Minimum Export Price of USD 550/tonne with 40% export duty was retained [2]; the duty was halved in September 2024 and abolished from 1 April 2025 [3].
• Three reversals in roughly sixteen months leave sowing decisions without a stable price signal.

Why the reaction fails the farmer

• Perishability compresses time: onion cannot await a file's movement, so relief announced after peak mandi arrivals reaches growers who have already sold.
• Price fixed post-collapse: in the 2026 rabi season, agency rates trailed a cultivation cost of roughly ₹1,800/quintal, and farmers pressed for ₹3,000 [5].
• Thin coverage: buffer procurement was 4.68 lakh tonnes in 2024-25 [2] — a small share of output, and consumer-facing by design.
• Missing backbone: absent cold-chain and evacuation logistics, produce is dumped; Operation Greens exists precisely to cut post-harvest losses in the tomato-onion-potato chain [4].

The partial defence

• Buffer buying did lift the average procurement price to ₹2,833/quintal in 2024-25, 64% above ₹1,724 a year earlier [2].
• Relaxed size and blemish specifications widened farmer eligibility [5].

Reassembled, the instrument is sound in design but mistimed in use: it cushions the consumer promptly and the producer belatedly. Procurement prices pre-announced before sowing, a rule-based export regime insulated from panic, and storage created under the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund would convert reaction into anticipation — making price stabilisation genuinely two-sided.