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Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) have emerged as the most preferred institutional mechanism by development agencies and policy makers to confront challenges faced by smallholder farmers and empowering them in various ways. FPOs are able to leverage their collective strength and bargaining power to access financial and non-financial inputs and services, technologies, reduce transaction costs, tap high value markets and enter into partnerships with private and public entities on more equitable terms. In the last decade, an estimated 3500 FPOs have been registered and perhaps double this number are under various stages of being organised. Despite its vintage, performance of FPOs has fallen short of expectations, owing to several challenges ranging from management of business, lack of professional human resource, irregular supply and lack of timely financial assistance which restrains FPOs to realise their full potential.
National Association For Farmer Producer Organisations (NAFPO) is a national body through which the above-mentioned challenges faced by FPOs can be pushed. It is a network of multi-stakeholders, including experts and practitioners from policy, market access, financial access and FPO leaders. It has emerged to cater to the need of institutional consolidation to leverage aggregation of farmers into FPOs through a national representative body. Similar bodies exist and perform this functions in a number of areas, such as trade and industry, professional groups like lawyers and doctors, commodity associations etc. NAFPO is dedicated to building an enabling ecosystem for FPOs to thrive and achieve scale and sustainability. It supports FPOs, both for institutional development as well as business stabilisation and growth.
Expanded participation of stakeholders in shaping the agenda and action of NAFPO is critical to its success. For this purpose, an Associate Council has emerged to elicit participation and engagement of all the stakeholders so that collective energies can be mobilised to build a robust ecosystem. In last few months of its active existence, NAFPO has organised consultative and opinion-sounding multi-stakeholder consultations jointly with apex institutions like FICCI and NCDEX around improving access to credit and markets for FPOs. An action-oriented meeting with NAFPO’s Steering Committee and Associate Council was organised to deliberate suggestions to overcome challenges faced by FPOs. The recommendations related to policy were taken to NITI Aayog for further action.
