Goal of doubling farmers' income 'impressive': IFAD

India has kept an "impressive" target of doubling farmers' income by 2022 and the country will not be far in achieving that goal, Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) President Gilbert Houngbo said.
Houngbo -- former prime minister of West African nation Togo -- also said that IFAD is keen to partner with India for scaling up agri-programmes like electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM).
IFAD, a UN agency, provides low-cost financing to remote rural communities through government loans, currently working in India on nine projects in the area of agriculture, rural and tribal development and women empowerment.
In an interview to PTI, IFAD President said: "One of the challenges of India's Prime Minister is doubling the income of small farmers by 2022. This is an impressive goal."

"Whether that (doubling of income) does happen or not. Even if it does not happen exactly, I am sure you will not be far in achieving the target," he said.
Stating that IFAD will accelerate its efforts to pull out people out of poverty, Houngbo said the time has come more than ever for the Indian government to "rethink best strategic cooperation" and "readjust the business model of cooperation".

More concrete efforts and resources are required from the member countries because 850 million people in the world still go hungry everyday despite the global food production in 2017 was sufficient to meet demand of the likely increase in population by 2050, he noted.

The IFAD president further said India is offering electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM), under which farmers are trading online. "We think we can scale it up in our cooperation. We take experience of India to other countries."
IFAD provides low-cost loans from the corpus mobilised from its 176 member countries.
India, one of the founding members, has contributed USD 37 million for the three-year period 2016-18 to IFAD. The country has borrowed USD 152 million from the UN agency for agriculture and rural development projects in the same period.
Houngbo hopes that India's contribution grows and the country becomes eventually a net donor in the next 10-20 years from now. "This is our aspiration that India's contribution will be higher than the borrowing."

The UN agency is aiming to mobilise USD 1.2 billin for 2019-21. It is also looking at broadening partership for raising funds from capital market and private sector.