Dear Friends,
Good Day
We were looking for the answer to question of "What interventions do you think are needed to increase the agriculture sector resilience to environmental stressors, especially among smallholder farmers?" our experience indicates following points as important.
1. More or less policies of present day agriculture department are restrictive for diversity, mainly they focus on limited crops and varieties. Agriculture officers follows conventional extension programs which are of givers mode, not respecting farmers knowledge.
2. As for as small and marginal farmers are going through dilemma of traditional versus market controlled, nutrition oriented vis-a-vis cash generating. VAAGDHARA believes some where farmers need dual approach of nutrition sensitive farming with market approach, taking benefit of community awareness about the fresh and chemical free food.
3. There is need for strengthening a network of farmers led institutional platforms which will have interactive farming, research, education, and marketing. Unfortunately present day agriculture promotion institutions are in two parallel streams one is scientific & government institutions another is administrative department of agriculture management, which do not have concurrence at many front.
4.In this direction we have been using approach of creating local level farmers network, we are also moving towards traditional institution of "Gram Chopal" to take this agenda forward. In this direction we would like to collaborate with other agencies and groups who are active with this approach.
5.Improvement in farm diversity through tools like "What we produce - What we consume" and focusing on concept of reducing "Food Mileage" could be really helpful in this direction
Thanks
Deepak
Mr. Deepak Sharma