New Delhi
The Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction (JFPR) has approved $2-million grant to provide key knowledge and technical support to an Asian Development Bank (ADB)-funded project that aims to promote agribusiness network in Maharashtra to boost farm incomes and reduce food losses. This was stated in an ADB press release on November 8.
The grant, together with ADB’s Technical Assistance Special Fund of $0.5 million, will support the $100-million Maharashtra Agribusiness Network Project (MAGNET) approved by ADB on 27 September.
The project will help small and marginal farmers in Maharashtra improve their post-harvest and marketing capacity, reduce food losses and increase incomes through access to finance, capacity building and horticulture value chain infrastructure development.
The JFPR funding supports key outputs of the project by promoting farmer producer organizations (FPOs) and sensitizing farmers on good agriculture practices, new crop varieties and other technical innovations. It will also promote high-level innovative technologies in the agribusiness value chain from aggregation, storage, processing and logistics to marketing.
The grant will help identify at least 12 anchor FPOs and potential FPOs to form crop-wise centre-of-excellence networks for capacity development for target horticulture crops and expand domestic and export market access to farmers. At least 20 per cent of the beneficiary FPOs of value-chain acceleration and market link services will be owned or led by women.
The ADB project and the JFPR grant were built on the successful implementation of the previous JFPR grant for the ADB-supported Agribusiness Infrastructure Development Investment Program in Maharashtra (and Bihar). This project was implemented during 2010–2018. The grant interventions had helped establish over 1,400 FPOs with capacity development support.
JFPR was established in 2000 to support ADB projects that directly address the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable groups in Asia and the Pacific. Since its establishment, JFPR has approved $963 million to 491 ADB projects (as of December 2020) that help bring people out of poverty.