Empowering smallholder farmers: How Asian Countries are building up their agriculture backbones
One of the key sustainable development goals (SDG) initiated by United Nations is to eliminate zero hunger by agriculture. In Asia Pacific region, more than half of the labor force are concentrated in agriculture. Smallholder farmer is the major group with 450 million people and produce more than 80% of the food consumed in APAC region. Their existence is crucial to the local economy and its sustainable development. Hence, Asian countries are placing more importance in empowering their smallholder farmers to improve their livelihood by helping them increase productivity and efficiency of their farms. In this article, Alcimed dives into the three different ways that Asian countries are building up their smallholder farmers.
Providing financial assurance to smallholder farmers with online platforms
Despite being the major providers of food in the region, smallholder farmers are among the world’s most financially challenged. As a result, Asian countries have set up initiatives to provide financial assurance, such as encouraging the adoption of e-commerce to help farmers make direct sales. For instance, in July 2022, the Indian government has launched Platform of Platforms (PoP) under e-NAM (National Agriculture Market), an online trading platform for agricultural commodities in India. This new platform incorporated 41 services providers from various value chain services including trading, quality checks, warehousing, fintech, market information and logistics. With such competent ecosystem, smallholder farmers in India could be largely benefited in product selling and distribution throughout agricultural value chain.
Private entities are also leveraging online technologies to help local farmers. In Aug 2022, the first Asia digital business studio has launched by Cargill and co-hosted by Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB). The studio aims to support local startups that focus on pressing industry challenges from addressing the access to market data for smallholder farmers to providing efficient food supply solutions.
