The project will support 100 Adivasi Seed Mothers to conserve Climate Resilient local seeds, organise local women farmers groups and support 5,000 small family farms to produce enough food for their families and earn by selling surplus food, in Southern districts of Odisha state in India. Adivasi communities lost diverse varieties of traditional drought resilient paddy, millet and pulses seeds to hybrid market seeds and severe climate change effects over last few decades.
Thousands of Adivasi households living in the interior southern districts in Odisha, India are losing control over their local food, food systems and food cultures owing to multifold structural marginalisation. Once self-reliant Adivasi families are now facing repeated crop loss due to unpredictable Climate Change effects, food & income from forest reduced to all time low, trapped into cycles of debt, food insecure, large-scale migration to cities in search of work and living with deprivation.
This project will sustain their local food cultures and conserve diverse local seeds. The Seed Mothers of this project would support 5000 adivasi women farmers, form their village groups and Farmer Producer Company to help them reclaim their small family farms to start climate resilient farming, harnessing the local resources as adivasi women trained on sustainable agriculture practices so that these families would produce enough food for the families and get income from sale of surplus food.
This project would organise 5000 adivasi small/marginal farm families to get trained on climate resilient low cost farming methods to reclaim their family farms, enable families to turn food secure and will earn from sale of surplus food through the collective marketing process using their own Farmer Producer Company. The project would also bring in health and over all well being of the adivasi families to the farmer groups and their peoples organisations.
This project has provided additional documentation in a XLSX file (projdoc.xlsx).