Building Partnership Ecosystem for Sustainable & Fair Sourcing of Maize from Small Farmers

Maize has emerged as a strategically important crop in India, transitioning rapidly from a food crop to a key industrial commodity linked to poultry feed, starch industries and ethanol production. However, the maize value chain continues to remain fragmented and vulnerable to unstable market prices, weak post-harvest infrastructure, inconsistent quality standards, liquidity constraints, and limited institutional capacity among smallholder farmers and Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs).

In response to these challenges, Godrej Agrovet Limited (GAVL), under the Good & Green sustainability framework, partnered with Landstack and IIM Ahmedabad to explore pathways for developing a sustainable, fair, and inclusive maize sourcing ecosystem in Madhya Pradesh. The project seeks to strengthen linkages between farmers, FPOs, aggregators, institutional buyers, finance institutions and ecosystem actors through a partnership-driven model.

The initiative combines field-based supply chain mapping, stakeholder consultations, institutional assessments and ecosystem workshops to identify systemic bottlenecks and build scalable solutions around aggregation, storage, finance, quality systems, governance, and inclusive sourcing. The larger vision is to create a resilient maize sourcing ecosystem that ensures fair price discovery for farmers while improving sourcing stability, traceability, and sustainability for institutional buyers.