In order to bring about sustainable transformation and business orientation into the Indian Agriculture sector, there have been schematic interventions to promote unique forms of social capital for farmers, called Farmer Producer organizations (FPOs). Many stakeholders, particularly NGOs, are involved in promoting and handholding these FPOs in a target-driven mode by promoting a large number of such institutions across the country.
India is witnessing dwindling gains from agriculture for the smallholder farmers because of high cost of inputs, changing climate impacting production, fluctuating market prices of outputs, and weak delivery of services at the last mile. The value share of farmers in the commodity supply chain needs to be increased to ensure that farming remains a remunerative livelihood option. There has to be a wider acceptance of the fact that the country needs partnerships among multiple players with complementary knowledge and expertise for its agricultural development.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) financed the second Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resource Management Project (CHARMP2), in areas where poverty is most severe among indigenous peoples in the highlands of the Cordillera Region in northern Philippines. The aim is to reduce poverty and improve the livelihoods of indigenous peoples living in farming communities in the mountainous project area. The indigenous peoples consist of many tribes whose main economic activity is agriculture.
The paper, prepared for the "High Level Policy Dialogue on Investment in Agricultural Research for Sustainable Development in Asia and the Pacific" (Bangkok Thailand; 8-9 December 2015), presents the Common Framework on Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS).The framework is a core component of the Action Plan of the TAP, a G20 Initiative, aiming to increase coherence and effectiveness of capacity development for agricultural innovation that lead to sustainable change and impact at scale.
Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) and short organic supply chains have emerged as promising solutions for smallholder farmers to provide organic produce to nearby consumers. PGS is an institutional innovation that builds trust among producers, traders and consumers through a low-cost transparent and participatory certification mechanism. They have particularly gained a foothold among smallholder farmers in middle- income countries, where third-party certification costs are often unaffordable.
In India, Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) are considered as the most preferred institutional mechanism for enhancing productivity and income of farmers. This is based on the resounding success of a few farmer collectives that have aggregated their produce to realise better incomes. However, when efforts were made to scale up this interesting model across the country, several challenges emerged.
Though Odisha is India’s top sweetpotato-producing state, most farmers grow low-yielding varieties of limited nutritional value. The Odisha Directorate of Horticulture and the International Potato Center (CIP) spent four years promoting improved varieties and good agricultural practices in four districts of Odisha, resulting in a 25 per cent growth in the area dedicated to the crop, a 17 per cent increase in farm productivity, and a 40 per cent increase in farmer incomes within the project areas; as well as the introduction of a nutritious, orange-fleshed sweetpotato variety.
Capacity building for integrating gender in research and development (R&D) on agricultural innovations often remains with organizing single gender training. Alternatively, it is often limited to hiring a gender specialist to allocate a small amount of her/his time to the project. This has proofed to be ineffective and a heavy burden for gender specialists. This success story presents an innovative approach to capacity development, which successfully changed agricultural researchers’ attitude to gender in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus in Vietnam.
With the ratification of Republic Act (RA) No. 10055 or the Philippine Technology Transfer Act of 2009, the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCAARRD) has intensified its efforts on technology transfer by establishing the DOST-PCAARRD Innovation and Technology Center (DPITC). The Center is designed to deliver quality services on technology commercialization and intellectual property (IP) management.
In an effort to reinvigorate and strengthen its agriculture research system, the Department of Agriculture, Ministry of Agriculture and Forests (MoAF), designed a series of capacity building programmes over the last six months. The initiatives were instrumental in building functional capacities (soft skills) of over 90 officials, who mostly represented the country’s four agriculture research centres.