The Foundation for Development of Rural Value Chain (FDRVC), a non-profit organization (NGO) backed by the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) and Tata Trusts, and Innoterra, a Swiss-Indian AgriTech corporation, have inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote and incubate commercially viable farmer collectives.
FDRVC is a national-level implementing agency of the Union government’s flagship 10,000 FPO scheme, which focuses on women-owned farmer collectives across India. With a presence in 14 countries, Innoterra is on a mission to revolutionize the food ecosystem in order to supply safe, high-quality, and healthy food products to global customers on a long-term basis.
As part of this collaboration, Innoterra, a Swiss-Indian AgriTech corporation, will provide FDRVC-promoted FPOs with verifiable traceability, food safety, packaging, and branding capabilities, as well as marketing linkages. FDRVC has FPCs working on oilseeds, small millets, spices, and pulses in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand.
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Pilot project
Innoterra will pilot this partnership with Baiga Chak Mahila Kisan Utpadak Producer Company Ltd, Dindori, Madhya Pradesh, which is involved in the pulses and small millet value chain. The Farmer Producer Organisation (FPC) is supported by Madhya Pradesh’s State Rural Livelihood Mission and the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) as part of the World Bank-funded National Rural Economic Transformation Project (NRETP).
According to the Dindori based company, Innoterra will provide a platform for farmer collectives and FPCs to showcase their farm commodities on its marketplace and benefit from the economies of scale and synergies provided by the company’s ecosystem of services, that includes commercial support, affordable financing, farm advisory, quality inputs, and management tools, and skill-building.
Rural communities will benefit
As per the company, the combination of Innoterra’s technological expertise and FDRVC’s extensive network of farmer collectives will now provide rural communities with a tangible way to combine the best of the brick-and-mortar (BM) world with digital implementation strategy to maximize the value for their products.
According to Nitin Puri, Head of Platforms and B2B Marketplace at Innoterra, the collaboration with FDRVC will democratize access to markets for packaged food enterprises in rural areas.
According to Alok De, CEO of FDRVC, the partnership with Innoterra will help enable market linkages for the produce of small and marginal farmers on a large scale. ‘We believe Agri services in India are at an inflection point, buoyed by favorable policies such as PLI and infra development packages.’
Further ‘Our goal will be to seamlessly integrate fragmented production of high-potential farm products like millets, pulses, oilseeds, fruits, and others into a structured ecosystem where producers can access all the benefits of formalization and scale, through partners like Innoterra,’ De explained.
The Memorandum of Understanding was initially signed for two years, with the option to automatically renew for another two years.
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