Agriculture
Kerala produces 97% of national output of pepper and accounts for 85% out of the area under natural rubber in the country. Coconut, tea, coffee, cashew, and spices — including cardamom, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg — comprise a critical agricultural sector. A key agricultural staple is rice, with some six hundred varieties grown in Kerala's extensive paddy fields. Nevertheless, home gardens comprise a significant portion of the agricultural sector. Related animal husbandry is also important, and is touted by proponents as a means of alleviating rural poverty and unemployment among women, the marginalized, and the landless. Feeding, milking, breeding, management, health care, and concomitant micro-enterprises all provide work for around 32 lakh (3.2 million) of Kerala's 55 lakh (5.5 million) households. The state government seeks to promote such activity via educational campaigns and the development of new cattle breeds such as the "Sunandini".
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Kerala
Famous quotes containing the word agriculture:
“But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In past years, the amount of money that has had to be been spent on armaments, great and small, instead of on productive industry and agriculture and the arts, has been a disgrace to all of us in every part of the world.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)