Caritas India in association with Social initiative for Growth and Networking (SIGN) hold a one-day smallholder farmers’ consultation at Social Development Centre (SDC), Purulia Road, Ranchi on 21^st September 2019. Over 85 smallholder farmers’ leaders and program coordinators, representing thousands of smallholders and rural producers across Jharkhand actively participated in the Smallholder Consultation.

Agriculture is the largest source of livelihoods in India. 70 percent of its rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood with 82 percent of farmers are belongs to small and marginal category. They solely depend on rain-fed agriculture in arid and semi-arid conditions. Out of 121 million agricultural land holdings, 99 million belong to small & marginal farmers contributing 70% to the total production against 44% in landholdings. Smallholders meaning farmers depending on a small piece of land and practicing subsistence farming to meet their dietary requirements (Food availability). This makes a major concern to engage with smallholder farmers, more strategically and sensitively to trigger their development through socially, economically, culturally and ecologically inclusive process.

With this objective, Caritas India promotes smallholder farmers, to collectivize to address their issues and challenges through an organized farmer’s led forum at various levels (i.e. village, block, district, state and national), exploring possible collaboration & technical support from all like-minded organisations/ departments/ research stations/ institution/ university.

Smallholders, while sharing challenges & gaps along with localised solutions which are acceptable in respect to their socio-economic scenario, they significantly draw attention towards more inclusive accompaniments & technical support in terms of capacity building, networking and convergence for future developments.

The innovative concept on smallholder farmers forum of Caritas India was presented by Mr. Pradipta Kishor Chand, NRM Thematic officer, Jharkhand on how smallholders across state can be well connected and have enabled access to their basic amenities even for smallholders belongs to geographically challenged locations by building a farmers’ cadre at various level as leader and decision-makers instead of mere a recipient.

Almost 3731 smallholders are part of seven district level farmers forum getting benefited with the support of Caritas India where 32 like-minded civil societies, regional research stations, university and academicians have been sharing their hands-on experiences to promote smallholder led innovations across the state in the last two years.

Smallholder forum encouraged farmers like us to participate more actively with many opportunities to learn new things and much needed information regarding low cost technologies, improved farming practices, service delivery, collective action, mutual learning and sharing, reduce the risk of exploitation by many players, uniform rates for farm produces, enable us to deal with other stakeholders and above all, power to take decision lies with us for the whole region while in farmers club we are limited to a small group not even for a village, shared by Prem Ganjhu of Balumath, Chandwa, member of farmers club.

More importantly, smallholder farmers forum provides opportunity to continue the link with smallholder farmer groups formed during various initiatives, smallholder farmers can have voice beyond their respective farmer groups, A platform to bring smallholder’s concern & access to appropriate solutions along with collective production, distribution and marketing. Says Gosner Gudia of Palkot Gumla, member of farmers forum.