The Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction (JFPR) has approved a $2 million grant to provide key knowledge and technical support to an Asian Development Bank (ADB)-funded project. This will be used to promote agribusiness networks in Maharashtra. It is also expected to boost farm incomes especially for small and marginal farmers and reduce food losses. The project will help these farmers to improve their post-harvest and marketing capacity, reduce food losses, and increase incomes through access to finance, capacity building, and horticulture value chain infrastructure development.
According to a statement released by ADB, the project will also promote high-level innovative technologies in the agribusiness value chain from aggregation, storage, processing, and logistics to marketing.
The grant will help identify at least 12 anchor farmer producer organizations (FPOs), the statement added.
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What is noteworthy is that at least 20 per cent of the beneficiary FPOs of value-chain acceleration and market link services will be owned or led by women.
In 2020, it committed $3.92 billion in sovereign loans for 13 projects in India, including $1.8 billion in Covid- 19 related projects to support the Centre’s pandemic response.
Meanwhile, as part of pandemic support to India, ADB has been providing emergency assistance to contain the impact of the Covid 19 disease while establishing social protection measures for relief to the poor and other vulnerable groups.
