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Plan for creating 10000 FPOs moving fast, meet told
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Tuesday, 01 March, 2022, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Ashwani Maindola, New Delhi
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The Indian Government's plan of creation of 10,000 new Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) across the country at an expenditure of Rs 6,865 crore is moving fast. Union Minister of Agriculture Narendra Tomar has said that the plan will help farmers in significantly reducing their cost of farming, as well as improving the quality of their products in line with global standards.
The Union Minister revealed this while addressing the FPO summit organised by CII & NCDEX in partnership with NABARD and NABCONS.
The FPO summit was aimed at bringing together all the stakeholders in the agri value-chain connected with FPOs on a common platform and showcasing how FPOs have been instrumental in impacting the entire agri value chain. Another area of focus of the summit was creating awareness on alternate market channels.
Dr G R Chintala, Chairman, NABARD, while addressing the inaugural session highlighted that while production increases, productivity remains a challenge and to overcome this challenge, FPOs need to leverage new technologies such as AI and Blockchain towards optimising collectivisation benefits.
Focussing on the importance of electronic market platforms for FPOs, S K Mohanty, whole-time member, SEBI, mentioned that price exchange platforms enable FPOs towards better bargaining power through price risk management and should be leveraged as a market channel for better income levels.
On industries' contribution, Sanjiv Puri, chairman, CII National Council on Agriculture, and CMD, ITC Ltd, mentioned that CII’s FPO Business Service Unit is working towards empowering farmers through input linkage, market linkage and capacity building towards making value chains competitive, climate resilient and ensuring better qualities for better price realisation.
The sessions at the summit focussed on alternative market channels and other financing options along with infrastructure connect. The conference discussed a wide range of topics focussing on production related challenges, input marketing, alternate output market channels offered to FPOs and also how FPOs are mainstreaming the corporate decision making for input marketing as well as procurement.
P K Swain, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, mentioned that the FPO model has the potential to enhance global trade of Indian GI products at competitive prices thus promoting exports and positioning India as a global trade leader.
Further experts also deliberated on the areas of concern in terms of financial literacy of the FPO members and the important policies and market forces for financial inclusion of the FPOs and how collective requirements from FPOs are shaping the need for on-farm infrastructure as well as other services.
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