NGOs Working for Farmers: Empowering Rural Agriculture

FPO’s Nearly 86% of farmers are small and marginal with average land holdings in the country being less than 1.1 hectares. These small, marginal and landless farmers face tremendous challenges during the agriculture production phase such as access to technology, quality seeds, fertilizers and pesticides including requisite finances. They also face tremendous challenges in marketing their produce due to lack of economic strength and strong marketing mechanisms. FPOs help in the collectivization of such small, marginal and landless farmers in order to give them the collective strength to deal with such issues. The year 2014 was observed as the “Year of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPO)” by the Government of India. It (FPO) is one of the important initiatives taken by SEARCH collaboration with NABARD.