• Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar inaugurated NAFED’s honey FPOs programme for helping set up farmer producers organisations (FPOs) for beekeepers and honey collectors in five states. It is under the Formation & Promotion of 10,000 FPOs scheme.

Formation & Promotion of FPOs scheme

• In the Union Budget 2019-20, the government announced formation of 10,000 new FPOs.

• Following this announcement, the Department of Agriculture Cooperation and Farmers Welfare (DAC&FW) approved a new central sector scheme titled “Formation and Promotion of Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs)” to form and promote 10,000 new FPOs with a total budgetary provision of Rs 4,496 crore for five years (2019-20 to 2023-24) and with a further committed liability of Rs 2,369 crore for the period from 2024-25 to 2027-28 towards handholding of each FPO for five years from its aggregation and formation.

• NAFED is one of the four implementing agencies of the central scheme, which aims to make agriculture self-reliant. The other agencies are Small Farmers' Agri-Business Consortium, NABARD and National Cooperative Development Corporation.

What is the Honey FPO programme all about?

• Beekeeping in India is highly predominant in the unorganised sector among the rural and tribal population. Despite having a huge potential of honey production in the country, the beekeeping industry is still under-developed. The adoption level of beekeeping is also quite less due to various constraints.

• NAFED will address these issues by acting as an intermediary and filling up the gaps between the elements of the beekeeping supply chain and also ensure price remuneration to the beekeeping farmers.

• Under the programme, NAFED will help in setting up FPOs for beekeepers in five states — West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

• Through these honey FPOs, the NAFED will also work for promotion of beekeeping as an occupation for unemployed women and tribal populations and uplift their livelihood.

• NAFED has already set up the first honey FPO ‘Chambal FED Shahad Utpadak Sahakari Samiti’ in Madhya Pradesh under the National Beekeeping and Honey Mission, which was registered on November 11, 2020. This FPO will cover five blocks consisting of about 68 villages in the Morena district of the state.

• The other four FPOs will be set up in Sundarbans (West Bengal), East Champaran (Bihar), Mathura (Uttar Pradesh), and Bharatpur (Rajasthan).

Together, it will cover 340 villages in five states.

• Through these five FPOs, 4,000-5,000 beekeepers and honey collectors would be benefited directly.

• The honey FPOs will not only help its members upgrade their skills in scientific beekeeping but also in setting up of state-of-the-art infrastructural facilities for processing honey and allied beekeeping products like bee’s wax and propolis. 

• Besides, they will also help in quality control lab collection, storage, bottling and marketing.

• These FPOs will also benefit from the government schemes under the National Bee Board’s National Beekeeping and Honey Mission (NBHM).

• Beekeepers and honey collectors of all the five states would be helped in branding and collective marketing of their honey and other allied products through the marketing channels of NAFED.

• Efforts will also be made to explore the foreign market to improve the returns to the beekeepers and honey collectors.

• Under the new FPO scheme, the government has approved 2,200 FPO clusters to all implementing agencies for the current financial year. 

What is NAFED?

• National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd. (NAFED) is an apex organisation of marketing cooperatives for agricultural produce in India. 

• It was established in 1958 under the Multi-State Co-operative Societies Act. 

• NAFED was founded with the objective to promote the trade of agricultural produce and forest resources across the nation.

• Agricultural farmers are the main members of NAFED.

• The activities of NAFED add to the betterment of agriculture and post harvest of the produce. NAFED procures stocks directly from the farmers in regulated mandis in open auction through the cooperative infrastructure thereby providing them a ready market, fair price and preventing their exploitation at the hands of private traders.

• Also, whenever there is a glut in market due to bumper production when prices tend to crash, NAFED undertakes procurement at the Minimum Support Price (MSP) under the Price Support Scheme in case of 16 notified commodities (pulses, oilseeds, copra, dehusked coconut, cotton) thereby providing remunerative prices to farmers for their produce.

• There are over 900 members in NAFED, represented by chief executives of apex level marketing/consumer cooperative/other national level federations, state level marketing/ tribal/commodity federations and primary cooperative marketing/processing societies.

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