The Foundation for Development of Rural Value Chain (FDRVC), a non-profit organisation supported by Ministry of Rural Development and Tata Trusts, and Innoterra, a Swiss-Indian agritech company, have signed an MoU to promote and incubate financially viable farmers collective.
FDRVC focuses on women-owned farmer collectives across India and is also a national level implementing agency of the Union government’s flagship 10,000 FPO scheme. Innoterra, with a footprint in 14 countries, is on a mission to transform the food ecosystem to sustainably provide safe, high-quality, healthy food products to global consumers.
As part of this partnership, Innoterra will provide FDRVC-promoted FPOs with verifiable traceability, food safety, packaging and branding capabilities, along with marketing linkages. FDRVC has supporting FPCs in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand, working on oilseeds, little millets, spices and pulses.
Pilot initiative
As a pilot for this partnership, Innoterra will work with Baiga Chak Mahila Kisan Utpadak Producer Company Ltd, Dindori, Madhya Pradesh, which is involved with pulses and small millet value chain. The FPC is sponsored by Madhya Pradesh State Rural Livelihood Mission and MoRD under the World Bank-funded National Rural Economic Transformation Project (NRETP).
Innoterra will provide a platform for the farmer collectives and FPCs to showcase their produce on its marketplace and benefit from the economies of scale and synergies provided by the company’s ecosystem of services including quality inputs, commercial support, farm advisory and management tools, affordable financing and skill-building, the company said in a statement.
Rural communities to get a boost
Innoterra’s technological expertise and FDRVC’s extensive network of farmer collectives will now offer rural communities a tangible way to combine the best of the brick-and-mortar world with digital enablement to maximise value for their products, it said.
The collaboration with FDRVC will democratise access to markets for packaged food enterprises in rural areas, said Nitin Puri, Head, Platforms and B2B Marketplace, Innoterra.
Alok De, CEO, FDRVC, said the partnership with Innoterra will help enabling market linkages for the produce of small and marginal farmers at scale. “Buoyed by favourable policies like PLI and infra development packages, we believe agri services in India are at an inflection point. Our aim will be to seamlessly integrate fragmented production of high-potential farm products, such as millets, pulses, oilseeds, fruits and more, into a structured ecosystem where the producers can access all the benefits of formalisation and scale, through partners such as Innoterra,” De said.
The MoU has been initially signed for two years with an option to automatically renew for two more years.