Building Partnership Ecosystem for Sustainable & Fair Sourcing of Maize from Small Farmers
Maize holds a pivotal position in Indian agriculture, ranking as the third most important cereal crop after rice and wheat. Its cultivation engages more than 12 million maize growers, and the crop contributes approximately 2% to the total value of output from all crops in the country. The demand for maize is highly diversified, extending beyond food consumption to increasingly moving towards industrial applications.
The Indian maize sourcing market is a complex ecosystem, characterised by a multi-tiered competitive landscape. While there is a growing recognition and strong rhetoric around the need for sustainability and traceability, widespread, tangible implementation remains in its nascent stages, primarily due to infrastructure deficiencies, high costs, and the highly fragmented nature of the smallholder farming base
The proposed program is designed to build and sustain an ecosystem, with a group of concerned actors in corporate, government, NGO and Academics, with interest and commitments towards sustainable and fair source of maize.
The key objective is to augment the income of farmers while establishing a robust institutional mechanism, that supports, more synergistic and just connections between Maize farmers (including tenants, women and small farmers), their farming system (crop and farm components along with access to finance, inputs and knowledge) and the market system around the maize supply/value chains (postharvest aggregation, processing, storage and sale).
It aims to establish and strengthen a well-structured and organised value chain around maize