Operation Flood provides an excellent example of the power of infrastructure and marketing. Launched in 1970, it created multitier milk production and marketing cooperatives throughout India that have succeeded in moving milk from rural producers to urban consumers via collection and processing centers, thus improving food availability and raising rural incomes. India's dense population helped make this approach cost-effective. Even in villages with no motorable road, bicycles move milk quickly to a nearby dairy. Continued expansion of dairy production in the semiarid tropics will require efficient water management to support green fodder production.
Many agricultural commodities remain subject to various marketing restrictions.
Marketing costs could be reduced through reforms such as allowing free interstate trade in rice, abolishing stocking limits on private traders, introducing a futures market to help reduce marketing costs, and removing cotton export quotas. Finally, investment opportunities vary with both agroclimatic and infrastructural conditions within the semiarid tropics. Just as successful dairy development has required at least modest access to irrigation, soybeans and groundnuts both flourished where agroclimatic conditions were particularly suitable. Another factor that distinguishes the semiarid tropics is distance from a large town or city. More remote areas need more employment and may be attractive for labor-intensive industrial development.