Farmer Producer Company: India’s Magic Bullet to Realise Select SDGs?

Abstract

Sustainable development goals (SDGs) are designed for the betterment of the underprivileged and the marginalised. Some of the sub-goals target doubling agricultural productivity and incomes of the small-scale food producers to realise the SDGs. Access to land, technology, inputs and financial services, opportunities for value addition and markets, non-farm employment and effective and transparent institutions that ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels are assumed to be the means to that end. Based on the Alagh Committee report’s recommendations, to address the voids in the existing form of collectives, producer company as a new legal option was introduced in 2003 by amending the Companies Act. This new form of collective is expected to combine efficiency and professional management of the company form and the cooperative principles necessitating ownership and participation of and governance by producers. This study takes a mixed-method approach. It qualitatively inquires about member’s perception of roles farmer producer companies (FPCs) play in their lives and livelihood. With the help of performance data from five FPCs, this study elaborates on the promises this form holds in realising some of the SDGs and challenges FPCs facing that could make achieving these promises a distant dream.

(Farmer) Producer Companies in India as new generation cooperatives: Case studies of performance and impact from West Bengal, India

“…The above review shows that these are mostly individual PC case studies of impact or those with only member farmer based assessment. There are others which only assess financial performance of PCs (Singh & Singh, 2014; Kakati & Roy, 2021; Mourya & Mehta, 2021; Trivedi et al., 2022) or report just PC Board members’ and CEOs’ perceptions based analysis of member impact or benefits (Deka et al., 2020; Mourya & Mehta, 2021), or those which only examine a single or a few PCs for impact on member farmers as compared with that on the non‐member farmers (Lalitha et al., 2022; Mukherjee et al., 2022). Some others attribute all gains from the sale of agricultural commodities by the member farmer households to the PCs (Trivedi et al., 2022).…”

“…This paper attempts to fills that gap. It is also crucial to examine the role and the potential of the PCs in enhancing farmer income or reducing production and marketing costs as there are questions on their potential role despite these entities supposedly being more innovative (Shah, 2016; Verma et al., 2019; Mourya & Mehta, 2021; Singh, 2022). This paper examines the impact of the PCs in the context of the West Bengal state of India with survey interviews of the member and the non‐member farmers across five PCs organized by two large and national level promoters, who work across Indian states with significant experience in this domain promoting dozens of such entities over the years, totalling 126 farmers—64 members and 62 non‐members—carried out in January 2020.…”

Farmer Producer Organisations in North India: Potentials and Challenges

“…This situation leads policymakers to think about some alternative forms of aggregation (Kumari, Bharti and Tripathi 2021). A producer company was one such idea that started gaining currency in the last decade (Mourya and Mehta 2021).…”

Harnessing the Potentiality of Farm Landscape for Trees Based on Satellite Evaluation: A GIS Modeling Perspective

“…Sustainable developmental goals (SDGs) of the FAO report reveal India's rank was 110 in 2017 which has down to 117 in 2020. India's SDG performance gap is more than 20% in more than 10 SDGs in the areas of hunger, health and well-being, inequality, gender equality, sustainable communities, clean water and sanitation, energy, infrastructure, strong partnerships, and institutions for goals (Mourya and Mehta 2021). India also represents 23.8% of the achievement gap on SDG2 (zero hunger) and the reduction of undernourishment for 14.5% of the Indian population can help to achieve to reduce the gap of 27.4% of the world in SDG2 targets (Sachs et al 2020).…”

“…Despite the increased yield in the agricultural crop, relative income per farmer needs special attention as over 70% of the country's population is dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. As 90% of the small and marginal farmers depends on 55% of the total cultivated lands being rainfed in India and most of the lands in the country are prone to natural disasters (Mourya and Mehta 2021). Thus it is a great challenge for increasing farmers' income, health, and happiness and mitigating poverty among them.…”