Business Call to Action and Innovative Agricultural initiatives

Three new commitments in the area of agriculture to the Business Call to Action include Honey Care Africa, Shree Kamdhenu and Itochu.

In Kenya, nearly half of the country’s 40 million people are unable to meet their daily nutritional requirements. Honey Care Africa has committed to incorporate 40,000 rural families in its supply chain by 2017 and increase their income by up to 20 per cent. The company plans to equip honey producers with high-quality beehives, maintenance tools, and expertise while guaranteeing a fair-trade market in which beekeepers can sell their honey. The beneficiary small-scale farmers are likely to see 15-30 per cent growth in yield from other crops through increased pollination from healthy bee colonies.

In India Shree Kamdhenu has designed a unique milk collection system to improve productivity at the grassroots level, called Akashganga. This comprises an automated, electronic milk collection system geared toward village dairy cooperatives. It efficiently weighs milk output, indicates fat content, calculates prices payable to suppliers, and provides customer numbers and date-time labeling. The company aims to raise smallholder income for an estimated 600,000 farmers mainly in northwestern Gujarat, parts of Maharashtra and a few other selected states by 2014.

Photo Credit: Shree Kamdhenu Electronics

Finally, in another case, in order to make the shift to organic farming and reduce costs and negative effects of agrochemicals, two Japanese companies, ITOCHU and kurkku, initiated a joint initiative called Pre Organic Cotton (POC) Program. As part of this business and social initiative, Indian cotton producers will be supported in shifting to organic farming as a part of value chain. The main support includes four tasks; (1) to undertake purchase guarantee in volume before seeding, and purchase cotton with a subsidy to assist with organic growing for yield drop after harvest; (2) to dispatch organic farming instructors to farmlands; (3) to support farmers to get their farmland certified as organic; and (4) to provide farmers with non-genetically modified seed. In this program, ITOCHU and kurkku work closely with two local ginning and textile companies, which hold organic certificate and play significant role in operation of POC program; they are Raj-Ecofarm in Madhya Pradesh and Deesan in Maharashtra in India