Rapid Rural Appraisal on Food Security Situations
SBKS has conducted a Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) to assess the impact of price hikes of food, feed, fuel, fertilizers, and finance (5f) on the food security and nutrition of smallholders’ farm households. The findings of the RRA portrayed a real-time scenario on the agricultural and food security situation of the marginalized farming community which eventually contributed to select appropriate interventions for writing proposal for additional funding under seventh call for proposal of the GAFSP. [Read more]
MMI Project Steering Committee Meeting
The second Project Steering Committee (PSC) meeting was held virtually on 9 September 2020 on Zoom. The meeting was called by the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) to review the current progress of the project and to approve the necessary adjustment. The main agenda items were: (i) review of first PSC recommendations; (ii) progress review (up to August 2020); (iii) approval of additional activities and financing for COVID-19 emergency response; and (iv) extension of the project end date for additional activities (next two Boro seasons). After a lengthy discussion, the PSC came to the following four decisions [Read more]
Performance of MMI Revolving Loan Fund
Since March 2018, FAO Bangladesh has been facilitating access to finance for smallholder farmers through the pilot project, ‘Increasing Access to Finance for Farmer Organizations’. The project is part of the Missing Middle Initiative (MMI) funded by the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP). The project is implemented in collaboration with the Sara Bangla Krishak Society (SBKS) – a national apex of 55 producers’ organizations (POs). The project develops the capacity of POs to access value chains, markets, technology, information and finance. [Read more]
Agribusiness Cluster Mapping and Market intelligence Survey
Agriculture in Bangladesh is now in transition – shifting from subsistence to semi-commercial or commercial ventures. The drivers are smallholder farmers those constitute 85 percent of the farming community. They have been changing cropping patterns, diversifying crops, using appropriate scale technologies and investing in high value agriculture, be it livestock, fisheries, agroforestry or high value crops rather than traditional rice paddy. As a result, high value agriculture clusters are emerging all over Bangladesh—from riverine chars to coastal chars to haor flood plains to the hills.[Read more]
Participatory Approach of Mobilizing Smallholders into Producers’ Organizations
Smallholder Producer Organizations (POs) play a pivotal role in any investment projects especially for providing extension services and reaching the out-of-the-reach community. During 2012-2013, FAO –Bangladesh has conducted Farmers Organization (FO) Mapping and Capacity Assessment to fill the knowledge gap around FOs in Bangladesh. The report unveiled 198 114 FOs of various types were identified. Eighty-one percent were formed with support from government agencies, 14 percent from national NGO s, 5 percent from international NGOs, less than 0.01 percent – only 12 organizations – were formed autonomously and just over 2 percent of FOs are federated at any level.[Read more]