Thiruvananthapuram, April 29 (IANS) Can a monkey do a man's job? Yes, when it comes to climbing tall coconut trees and plucking its fruits - a skill that has been hit by labour shortage, say the Kerala authorities.
With
fewer people in the state willing to take up the arduous and risky job,
the coconut business has taken a beating. To keep up the supply of the
fruit, trained monkeys seem to be the best alternative, feels the
state's agriculture department.
"Coconuts are essential to the
traditional lifestyle and livelihood of the people of Kerala. However,
the coconut business has dropped drastically due a shortage of tree
climbers," K.R. Vijayakumar, deputy director of the Kerala agriculture
department, told IANS here.
"So we have a proposal where monkeys
can be trained to carry out the task of plucking coconuts. The animals
can be better than humans in coconut plucking. And it will also be cost
effective."
The proposal is not new since monkeys are being used for plucking coconuts in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, he said.
But if implemented in India, he foresees animal activists protesting against the move.
"Due
to animal cruelty laws, animal rights groups may protest against the
move. So we have not been able to pursue the proposal," Vijayakumar
said.
However, he said like elephants are trained to pick up logs
and ox trained to plough, monkeys too can be trained to pluck coconuts.
"Monkeys are smart animals and can get nuts from even tall and slender trees. Plucking coconuts is not a simple task," he said.
Kerala
has more than 15 million coconut trees and requires at least 40,000
climbers to pick the fruits, according to data from Coconut Development
Board in Kochi.
However, with rising literacy rate and
immigration to the Gulf, few people in Kerala are interested making a
living by climbing coconut trees all day, he said.
"A trained
monkey can climb 500 coconut trees a day. A human cannot climb more than
50 trees a day since it takes a person over 10 minutes to climb. This
also involves a lot of risk," he said.
He said a training centre
for monkeys could be set up where trainers from Indonesia and Thailand
teach some monkeys on a trial basis and make them pick coconuts.
However, others differ.
"A
coconut tree produce about 60 nuts every 45 days and as it flowers
continuously, the nuts ripen at different times. Monkeys being monkeys
cannot decide whether a nut is ready to be plucked or not," said a
member of the Coconut Development Board who did not want to named.
The member, instead, favoured robots over animals when it came to picking climbing trees and picking coconuts.
However,
an agriculture department official countered the objection, saying that
the board's efforts to use climbing equipments, including robots, for
the job, and setting up a coconut climbing training institute had not
worked out.
"We are facing an acute shortage of coconut tree
climbers and we need to address the issue as since sale of coconut is
one of our important industries," said Biju Mathew, a coconut farmer.
"When
the government can start a $20,000 competition to develop three
coconut-picking machines, why can't it accept the idea of monkeys
climbing coconut trees?"
http://www.newstrackindia.com/newsdetails/2012/04/29/113--Coconut-plucking-could-be-monkey-business-in-Kerala-.html
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