Theme: Agriculture Finance

The blog highlights the challenges faced by the FPCs in using derivatives markets like futures and options and what steps need to be taken to overcome these challenges.

India’s farmers have had a long history of struggle. For decades, they have battled a multitude of agricultural challenges, such as fragmented landholding, numerous intermediaries, and low value addition. In response, the country has actively promoted farmer producer organizations (FPOs) as a solution. FPOs intend to address these serious issues through the aggregation of demand for high-quality inputs, credit, and technologies and the aggregation of outputs to improve smallholder farmers’ market access. Yet despite these efforts, major processors and output purchasing companies hesitate to engage directly with FPOs. This blog explains the options available for FPOs to trade with institutional buyers and the on-ground issues FPOs must overcome to establish better market linkages.

AI in agriculture is moving toward hyper-personalization and multimodal models, which use diverse data sources for personalized solutions. Institutions should embrace the transformative AI potential to benefit smallholder farmers and build a resilient agriculture ecosystem.

Our recent work in Bihar highlighted climate change’s persistent impact, which led to disruptions from heat waves, droughts, and floods over the past decade. This has led to a significant increase in pest infestations for farmers. Bangladesh also observed similar challlenges where extreme heat and saline land from previous cyclones complicated land preparation. Erratic rainfall delayed and dried seeds, followed by torrential downpours that flooded and washed away crops. Cyclone Amphan further worsened conditions. It wiped out standing crops and introduced saline water, which made the soil less fertile. We worked with CGAP in Bangladesh and DECODIS in Nigeria on a macro scale and found climate change’s adverse effects on livelihood capitals.

This blog highlights the gendered impacts of climate change on women in developing nations. Women face higher risks and burdens from climate change due to several factors. These include limited participation in decision-making, unequal access to resources, and gender-based cultural norms. These gendered impacts lead to socioeconomic, health, and behavioral issues for women. Climate change also increases their unpaid labor, emotional stress, and social problems, such as child marriages. Limited access to education and resources, in turn, hinders women’s entrepreneurship and limits their resilience-building capacity. This blog uncovers many women’s voices and brings back the focus on women’s involvement in community-level planning for effective climate change adaptation.

MSC (MicroSave Consulting) conducted a webinar titled “Digital agriculture solutions for climate-resilient smallholder agriculture: Lessons from the GSMA” on 21st June 2023. Click on the timestamps from the webinar stream to hear specific segments. You can also click on the image below to experience the complete webinar.