Agriculture is the mainstay of the Indian economy. With 50% plus population earning its livelihood from this vocation, agriculture continues to be important for economic growth and social transformation. While rapid agriculture growth made India a food secure nation, the food availability and accessibility, and the recent agrarian agony is not hidden from anyone. Given the India led UN Declaration of the Year 2023 as the International Year of Millet, a much higher focus on smart foods and nutrition and healthy food systems is going to be globally placed, and opportunities for India to substantially expand. Indian States will have to devise plans to step up production to tap the global market opportunities. The PM’s vision of doubling farmers’ incomes by 2022 yet again provides much onus on the States to take the performance of Indian agriculture to a new level. In aiding India to become a $5 trillion economy before 2025, agriculture sector must contribute $1 trillion. The call to doubling agri exports to $60 billion by 2022 and to $100 billion by 2025, States have critical role to play in augmenting the growth momentum and complimenting the national initiatives.
The fulfillment of this vision would require a series of interventions to improve production and productivity along with economizing the cost of production, improving the quality, and supply and value chain. Farmers also need to partner in this opportunity and to also get remunerative price and better marketing channel for their production. State governments have been playing an enabling role, focusing on fostering agriculture growth with efficient marketing and administrative support to farmers. The State Governments have realized the importance of integrating farmers with the global supply chain and the awareness relating to good agricultural practices, traceability, precision agriculture, digital farming and scientific management, higher productivity and higher realization. Thus, integration of farmers to the global best practices and the advanced technologies and services and farmer-industry partnerships is crucial to accelerating the growth, value addition and in achieving the target of doubling of the farmers’ income by 2022.
Scaling up such initiatives across states can help pushing the agri exports of India, while providing incentives for businesses to invest and partner across agri value chain. To discuss the role and the contribution of the states in development of agriculture, emerging challenges and opportunities, and to facilitating them to holistic approach to agriculture development, ICFA is organizing 1st India Agri Growth Summit on March 23, 2022 in New Delhi.
India Agri Growth Summit will bring all the states and concerned stakeholders on single platform to engage in deliberations while advancing towards a progressive regulation, seamless inflow of the information to create awareness and understanding among masses and effective advocacy, keeping global trends and emerging market, policy and technology paradigm into account. The event will provide opportunity to states to share their policy initiatives, best practices and success models among other states and with important stakeholders so as to allow cross pollination of ideas in order to attract investments, linkages and partnerships for pushing overall growth.
Underscoring the role of the districts in agriculture development, ICFA has documented district specific technological interventions, program implementation and success models to address location specific problems of agriculture. In order to encourage districts and translate this into action, ICFA will be bestowing District Excellence Awards for their exceptional works in the field of agriculture, horticulture, livestock, fisheries etc. and functional areas of agriculture, success models created and achievements in programs implementation. The District Agricultural Excellence Awards aim at felicitating district administrations, organizations and individuals for their contributions by innovating for increased efficiency, affordability and improved performance of agriculture at the district levels. The awards are a national recognition for contributions to agriculture over the years. These awards, besides recognizing merit and accomplishments will help to trigger a healthy competition among districts to attain yet higher level of excellence in their respective fields.
Sharing global scenario, emerging trends, developments, challenges and opportunities and their implications for the States
Discuss the global and national policy, technology and business environment for agriculture, food trade and agribusinesses
Supporting the States with digital technologies, agri services, support ecosystem, investments and partnerships to accelerate growth
Sharing success stories by farmers, agri entrepreneurs and by the Government department and districts to be replicated
Providing platform to the states to ideate, showcase innovation and best practices, and discuss their applications to other states
Leveraging states leadership and their economic strength, to connect the global investors
Recognizing the District Administrations, district level organisations and individuals for their success stories and outstanding roles and contributions at the district levels