![]() ![]() ![]() Their net income increased from around US$600 in 2016 to US$3,300 in 2020. The farmers’ chili yields tripled, from 7.8mt/acre in 2016 to 22.7mt/acre in 2020. Making a Tangible DifferenceīLF did its first proof of concept in 2016 working with 20 smallholder farmers of green chili from 20 different villages around Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, India. The BLF centers pay special attention to unlock previously untapped business potential by supporting women smallholders and creating more opportunities for women, both in the roles of agri-consultants and agri-entrepreneurs. In short, the BLF Center becomes the center of a new ecosystem of education, training, financing, supplier, and distribution services for smallholders. The agri-entrepreneur works with local BLF partners to improve farmers’ financial literacy, provide financing and insurance services, offer integrated access to supplies of efficient irrigation equipment, seeds, fertilizers, and crop protection, and downstream connections to regional aggregators, distributors, markets, and corporate supply chains. The education and training enable the smallholders to operate with lower environmental footprints while becoming higher-quality and higher-yield producers. Assisted by a BLF agri-consultant, the agri-entrepreneur then develops a model farm where local farmers are trained in effective, efficient, and sustainable agronomic and irrigation practices. The agri-entrepreneur, typically a farmer from the community or a young graduate, receives training in modern agricultural practices and business at a BLF Academy. Each center is owned and operated by an agri-entrepreneur under an agreement with BLF. The novel component in a BLF ecosystem is a Better Life Farming Center that connects up to 500 small and previously fragmented, and isolated smallholder farmers in a region to the capabilities, products, and services of corporations and NGOs. The ecosystem also engages smallholders with downstream customers, including local aggregators, distributors, and off-taking corporations, and capacity-building partners, such as the IFC, Development Financial Institutions, NGOs and local farmer organizations. These products and services include education and training, access to credit and insurance, and supplies of seeds, fertilizers, crop protection, irrigation, and farming equipment. Local Ecosystems, Locally ManagedīLF creates local ecosystems of private and public partners, offering comprehensive and accessible services to smallholders. ![]() The alliance offers last-mile delivery solutions to help smallholder farmers become sustainable, commercially viable suppliers of agricultural products. Bayer, a global life science company, has been working with the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), Netafim, a global supplier of irrigation solutions, and more than 20 local partners at a country level to form the Better Life Farming (BLF) multi-stakeholder alliance. The global community and its businesses have every incentive to help small holders improve their productivity, escape poverty, and end destructive agricultural practices.Ĭompanies can help break this cycle through profitable and inclusive strategies that enable smallholders to lift themselves out of poverty by improving farming and business practices. Scientists have estimated that 10 to 15% of global carbon dioxide emissions can be traced to this deforestation. In order to increase their meager incomes, they cut down trees to access more land.īut this deforestation reduces the planet’s capacity for absorbing carbon gases from the atmosphere, releases carbon gases when the felled trees rot or burn and adds new greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the additional livestock and crops on the deforested land. They are vulnerable to adverse weather incidents and water scarcity, have limited access and low bargaining power with purchasers of their output, and incur high crop losses, estimated at 28% of their production during on-farm growing and post-harvest storage. Despite high rates of poverty and malnutrition, these smallholders produce food for more than 50% of the population in low-and middle-income countries, and they have to be part of any solution for achieving the 50% higher food production required to feed the world’s projected 2050 population of nearly 10 billion people.Īt present, these smallholders are trapped in a negative cycle that damages both themselves and the planet. More than 2 billion people currently live on about 550 million small farms, with 40% of them on incomes of less than U.S.
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