Background

The Agriculture sector has achieved significant momentum in the past decade. Mobilizing farmers into their collectives, as Farmer Producer Organisations, has emerged as the most preferred institutional mechanism for farmer prosperity by policy makers and development agencies. From modest beginnings, the FPO numbers have acquired impressive strength in many States. These initiatives have served as an example for FPO transition to become sustainable and achieve scale in the long-run.

Despite this, many FPOs face several challenges ranging from management of business, irregular supply of farm inputs and lack of timely financial assistance, water resource management and effective irrigation facilities in the southern states to ensure sustainable agriculture and production in these states. The ability to influence the agri-value chain in a significant manner remains far-fetched for the majority of FPOs. Therefore, the holistic approach to address the majority of challenges faced by FPOs is the need of the hour. With continuous awareness drives and initiatives, synergies between efforts on supporting FPOs can be integrated. This can help bridge the knowledge gap among state bodies, think tanks, promoting organizations and FPOs.

In this backdrop, the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC) proposes to organise an E-conference on "Promoting new FPOs & Raising Farmer Income in Andhra Pradesh & Telangana" on 27th August 2021 at 11.00 am through virtual interactive platform with active support from the Government of Andhra Pradesh and Government of Telangana along with SFAC, NABARD, and other Resource Institutions engaged in Creation and Promotion of New FPOs and working closely to strengthen the existing FPOs and sort out the bottlenecks they face.

The purpose of this webinar is to collectivize farmers, especially small farmer producers, of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to foster technology penetration, improve productivity, enable improved access to inputs and service and increase farmer incomes, thereby strengthening their sustainable agriculture based livelihoods. As such the seminar will emphasize on the following:

* Formation & mobilization of new FPOs with promotion of local speciality crops, value addition, organic farming & promote

agri-business entrepreneurship.

* Making FPOs and Farmers Atma Nirbhar and enable them to raise their income with proper guidance and hand holding across

the value chain.

* Enhancing the farm inputs, technology upgradation, water management, irrigation, supply chain and farm gate level

infrastructure facilities

* Role of Implementing Agencies/Institutions like - SFAC, NCDC, NABARD, NAFPO, etc.

* Role of National Project Management Agency (NPMA) in FPO Promotion.

* Role of Central and State Government towards extending relevant technical and financial support to these FPOs to make

them Atma Nirbhar

* Connecting FPOs through the e-NAM Platform and market linkages.

* Scope of Off Season farming, Contract Farming, Crop Rotation and other activities.

* Strengthening Input support, marketing support & post-harvest operations.

The E-conference will surely create a platform for knowledge dissemination on the aforesaid agenda and will also provide a huge platform to:

1. FPOs and their representatives to share the bottleneck, needs and requirements

2. Resource Institutions & Government Agencies to help with solutions and road ahead

3. Government to share the existing and upcoming schemes and

4. Corporates and Entrepreneurs to showcase their products and services to the huge pool of relevant stakeholders present during the

programme.