KP “Smallholders Agency” goes Asia

Tags: India , Small Producers Agency

After having visited Latin America and East Africa, the initiating team of “Smallholders Agency” (from Hivos, IIED and Mainumby) went to India from 1-7 February to focus on the Asian continent. The objectives were to identify Asian members for the KP’s Learning Network, to find out how the knowledge program may become embedded in India and to initiate the multi-stakeholder exploration of key topics for the knowledge programme.

Setting an example of local ownership, Hivos RO in Bangalore helped organise two Round Table meetings, jointly with the Center for Economic and Social Studies (CESS) in Hyderabad and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore. The Hyderabad meeting was between Hivos partners from India. The meeting in Bangalore was the official Round Table for Asia, with participants from Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and India, with backgrounds in business, farmers organizations, NGOs, universities and media.

The discussions were spiced by two field visits. One went to the kick-off of the Mobile Biodiversity Festival of Decan Development Society (DDS). After a grassroots ceremony with discussions on agricultural biodiversity and its wealth for farmers, bullock carts decorated with traditional seeds started their travel to villages for a month long road show. This trip was also a great opportunity for the participants to get further acquainted with each other, learn from each other’s experiences and arrange to visit each other’s projects for mutual learning. The Initiatives for Development Foundation (IDS) showed an example of brokering between the State Bank of India and farmers organisations to improve production and increase incomes especially by organizing and facilitation to access to low-interest finance. We also went on a field trip to Green Foundation that assists village seed banks. It was very interesting to see that the village seed banks appeared to be a vehicle not only for resilient agriculture but also of self-based empowerment of the groups that we visited. After experiencing the Green Revolution hybrid rice varieties, many farmers have turned their backs to the high cost and risks of external inputs. Farmers emanated a deep drive to again become autonomous, subsistence-based cultivators of multiple cropping systems with indigenous millet and rice varieties, selling their surplus on the markets.

Some of this atmosphere could be also noticed during the Roundtable discussions, e.g. when it was stressed that the first need is to support smallholders to become better farmers with multiple crops and reduced production cost, and engage with risky markets only on that resilient basis. Other voices were less market-aversive and rather pointed at the need to build farmer-based intermediary organisations between farming households and markets, where knowledge and skills can be aggregated and put to work in the value chain. Against this background, a passionate debate took place around big issues that will shape the future of small farmers in markets in the next ten years, e.g. can agriculture retain all farmers in the rural areas? Is resilient agriculture based on biodiversity and low external inputs synonymous of getting out of markets? Is it inefficient for NGOs to try to replace the middlemen? Are food security policies working against small producers and do they globalize insecurity? Virtually all discussants agreed on the challenge to make governments and research more relevant for smallholders. Five Asians will join the Global Learning Network together with the members from Latin America and East Africa, all innovative thinkers and practitioners in the world of agriculture and food. The Learning Network will set the agenda of the Knowledge Programme in the upcoming Learning Network meeting in April in Geneva, for which this trip has certainly provided lots of food for thought!