A few weeks ago, the Ministry of Agriculture uploaded on its website a draft policy on Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs), which, among other things, calls for a special subset within the primary sector lending norms of banks to make lending to FPOs easier, a scheme to incentivise hiring of talent in FPOs, and encouragement for farmer groups to establish agribusiness marketplaces acting as deemed mandis under state APMC laws.
Importantly, the draft suggests a three-tier institutional architecture for FPOs modelled on the lines of the highly successful “AMUL”.
It also calls for targeted development of primary-level FPOs