Agriculture

Agriculture

Climate change could hurt farmers’ income by up to 20-25% in the medium term, according to the Indian government’s latest annual economic survey. Extreme weather events, temperature rise and lower rainfall all threaten to derail the Indian government’s agenda of doubling farmers’ income across the country.

Agriculture is central to the Indian economy. It accounts for 50% of the country’s employment and 18% of its GDP. And in India, about 80% of farmers are smallholders – which is generally considered to mean they have two hectares or less of land. The main crops are wheat, maize, rice, millets, pulses, sugarcane and oil-seeds.

Small landholders lose out the most from this. It is not economically viable for most of them to transport their produce for centralized large-scale processing – and they lack local processing and preservation technologies. This results in a lot of wastage. This is then compounded by inadequate transport infrastructure – produce gets damaged on the journey because of bad roads, gets contaminated from repeated loading and unloaded, as well as lack of refrigeration.

Small farms also suffer from their reliance on middlemen to sell their product. As a result, they are sometimes compelled to sell it at less than the cost of producing it. We have some of the best ideas to make your business bigger, do contact us once to know about our ideas.