Empowering the farmer ICT as a medium

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Empowering the farmer ICT as a medium

• Arvind Chandrasekar
• Director AMD India

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Context of Indian Agriculture

• Excellent resources
• Plenty of arable land
• Rich diverse agro-climatic zones
• Strong research system
• Large growing markets
• Very resourceful Farmer
• Works very hard (whole family is on the farm)
• Takes risk (on weather, markets)
• Is innovative (adapting technology, managing
  risk)
• Yet, most of the farmers are poor

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.. Because of

• Small size (Average lt 1.5 Ha)
• Resource-poor, weak bargaining power
• Geographical dispersion (gt 600,000 habitations)
• Impacts access to real-time information
• Heterogeneity (agro-ecological conditions,
  knowledge, investment risk-taking ability)  
• High need for customisation
• Fragmented agri business industry
• Poor vertical coordination, not much value
  addition
• Weak infrastructure (Physical, Social,
  Institutional)
• Impacts access to markets, high transaction
  costs, increases risk (yields, prices) 

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THE SOLUTION IS GLOBALIZATION
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Demands of globalising agri-trade

• Transition from supply-driven to demand-driven
  value chains
• Quality as per customer needs ( changing diets)
• Traceability to farms farm practices (SPS, TBT)
  
• Competitiveness in Price / Value equation
• Increased farm yields
• Lower transaction costs along the chain
• Further accentuating the need for
• Customised knowledge
• Real-time relevant information
• Access to quality inputs at competitive prices
• Effective vertical coordination of the value
  chain
• Efficient Price discovery risk management

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Empowering the farmer Information
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Capabilities of IT

• Real-time multicasting
• Seamless workflow
• Storage retrieval of data
• Broadband connectivity
• Convergence of multimedia
• Unbundling rebundling the components of a
  transaction
• Collaboration vertical coordination
• Virtual aggregation
• Decoupling back-end from front-end

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Empowering the farmer - Economics
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Leveraging IT for empowering the farmer

• The traditional mandi system thrives because
  there is an inherent pressure on the farmer to
  sell due to the sunk cost of transportation, as
  well as time to market and the perishability of
  the goods coupled with seasonal demands from
  social food habits.
• In an empowered system the farmer has price
  discovery across markets/mandis in India and the
  globe to get the best deal for the crop.
• This unbundled price from a transaction leverages
  the real-time multi-casting ability of the WWW
  and the empowered farmer can now decide when and
  where to sell.

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Empowering the farmer Financial
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Empowering the farmer

• Only this time by -
• What to use KNOWLEDGE
• When to use INFORMATION
• Supply Chain TRANSACTION
• Only this time the farmer is under no pressure to
  sell and has reduced transaction costs, by
  avoiding the transaction costs involved in the
  mandi system and more importantly longer shelf
  life with a better time to market.

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The next step

• Web casting of best practices (Aka Krishi
  Darshan)
• Interaction across villages, crops or
  end-customer through chats and emails.
• 1-to-1 interactivity of the WWW together with
  relevant facilities -
• Soil testing, Water, virus information.
• Broadband connectivity to empower -
• VoIP, Reverse Auction, remote diagnostics,
  fertilizer information.

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THANK YOU

• Arvind.Chandrasekar_at_amd.com
• 91 98 107 02925