Deep Roots

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SEWA agriculture campaign: impacts

Small and marginal farmers in 2,400 villages across Gujarat, 11

states of India and three countries of South Asia have a local,

national and regional-level platform to share their issues and

best practices.

In the past five years, more than six policy-level dialogues have

been conducted at the regional level, following by workshops to

share cross-country experiences in agriculture. Following this, SEWA

is producing a booklet which provides all this information to small

and marginal farmers using the latest technology.

Until now agriculture has never been seen as an industry. In the

past five years SEWA’s agriculture campaign has worked to develop

agriculture as an industry. A total turnover of more than Rs350

million was achieved by family farms in 2013.

In order to equip small and marginal farmers against risks,

SEWA successfully piloted rainfall insurance, providing future

and spot prices to the farmers. This has now been taken up as a

campaign across India.

the context of the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF),

the United Nations asked SEWA to lead activities related to

awareness-raising and education in the South Asia region. This

opportunity will be used to focus efforts on the issues indicated

above. SEWA is the National Focal Point in IYFF celebrations

in India, and is working towards supporting and strengthening

women’s role and contribution in family farming.

SEWA promotes a family farming approach to ensure

food security and nutrition as well as to strengthen the local

economy, improve household capitalization and contribute

to poverty reduction by achieving sustainable development,

particularly in rural areas. SEWA recognizes the importance

of visualizing how family farmers produce healthy and nutri-

tious food while they respect the environment and contribute

to biodiversity. All activities related to family farming are placed

under SEWA’s agriculture campaign, which currently works

with more than 561,000 family farmers at the national level.

SEWA found that with Indian agriculture becoming femin-

ized and the problems of a farmer being closely intertwined

with the challenges faced by their family, women are best

placed to tackle such problems and work towards the economic

and social security of their families. Further to this, SEWA has

been witnessing the worsening food security situation first

hand, with many of its marginal farmer members struggling to

maintain good farm yields and many others struggling to meet

their daily food requirements because of stagnating household

income and rising commodity prices.

In response to its members’ demands, SEWA has been

running the following long-term food security schemes particu-

larly for those in drought hit zones.

The Shakti Packet Programme has been operational since

1993, and covers over 7,000 poor women and their house-

holds from far-off drought-prone areas of Banaskantha. A

typical packet contains coarse food grains such as millet and

wheat, edible oil, red chillies, tea, soap, iodized salt, turmeric

and vegetables. The entire scheme is managed and run by the

poor women themselves.

The Mobile Ration Van is aimed at providing timely and

sufficient availability of rations on the doorstep of the rural

community. The van supplies rations to 11 far-flung villages

covering over 6,000 households in the arid area of Patan

district. The rations supplied are typically wheat, rice and sugar.

This food supply system saves the poor women a lot of time.

They would previously have had to travel up to 20 kilometres

to buy these items, thereby losing a day’s wage.

The community seed bank is aimed to enhance the livelihood

security of small and marginal farmers by conserving indig-

enous genetic resources, and to empower farmers with organic

farming technologies. SEWA has set up farmers’ community

seed banks for seed exchange, distribution and utilization as

well as for the preservation of these varieties in three drought-

prone districts in Gujarat.

The community grain bank has been set up with the main

objective to provide a safeguard against starvation during

natural calamities/disasters and during the lean season by

lending stocks of grains for an average of 40-50 families. SEWA

has set up three grain banks in food-scarce (drought-prone,

desert and tribal) areas.

The Rural Urban Distribution Initiative (RUDI) was concep-

tualized with the twin objective of helping marginal farmer

get better prices and making better quality products available

to poor rural consumers at competitive prices. RUDI has its

origins in a SEWA initiative in 2001 that arose out of SEWA’s

strong belief in the Gandhian vision of a self-reliant village.

SEWA also believes that to sustain food security at the policy

level, the right to food should ultimately be linked with other

economic and social rights, such as the right to work (the

National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 is a step in

that direction), the right to education (recently enacted) and

the right to health. These economic and social rights comple-

ment and reinforce each other.

SEWA continues its march towards creating a vibrant

agricultural economy through constant innovation and

improvement in its approach towards the implementation of

agriculture development. Although significant progress has

been achieved in recent years, there is still much to be done

to support family farmers in India and help millions escape

The community seed bank helps to conserve indigenous genetic resources

and empower farmers with organic farming technologies

Image: SEWA

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