Agriculture

KEY POINTS

Challenges faced by Smallholder farmers

·         They are forced to face a cycle of low investment, poor productivity, low value addition, weak market orientation and low margins.

·         Decreasing landholdings due to fragmentation adds oil to burning fire.

·         Further a post-harvest value chain coupled with inefficiencies, causes post-harvest losses (PHL) to stack up throughout the value chain.

·         These stacking up or ‘hoarding’ causes inflationary effect on the economy and strikes a blow again upon the smallholder farmer as consumers.

Benefits of collectivisation

·         Greater bargaining power

·         Better market and price discovery

·         Access to credit and insurance

·         Sharing of assets and costs

·         It encourages private sector interest and builds the ability of farmers to invest in storage, crop protection and value addition infrastructure.

·         It also provides better access to market linkages and information through partnerships which enables farmers to reduce demand/supply imbalances and Post Harvest Losses.

Suggestions to strengthen

·         Technical support facility

·         Innovative capital infusion mechanisms

·         Potential alternative financing structures

·          Diagnostics and credit rating mechanism

·         Apex body for such groupings

Kindly review

Kindly review it. Thanks.