© Causes 2012. Anyone can change the world.
To Bring Millions of Rural Poor Farmers Out of Poverty
The rural poor, who mostly rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, face multiple challenges that prevent them from tapping the power of the marketplace. They have tremendous capacity to produce the commodity that is most in demand, most traded and most consumed in the world—food, yet they remain trapped in poverty. The current global food crisis has only heightened the importance of the farmers, most of whom are poor, to contribute to food security. They are not served by microcredit or technology interventions and their farming is subject to high risks from the vagaries of weather (drought, floods), pests and diseases outbreaks and unreliable markets. Thus, they farm with inadequate inputs, use pesticides inappropriately, and with poorly managed farms, produce low yields of ill-timed, poor quality and low priced products. To make matters worse, they frequently suffer catastrophic losses. As a result, their families have to survive on extremely low incomes struggling from meal to meal.
The Vipani Method: Vipani ("marketplace" in Sanskrit) makes small-scale farming profitable for poor farmers by offering financing tailored to their unique individual needs and simultaneously helping them effectively access and utilize markets, market information and technologies. We bring together market parties to operate within local market networks and we manage their relationships and obligations.
1. Give dignity, respect and trust to the poorest of the poor.
2. Even the poorest farmer can take responsibility for his/her own prosperity
3. The rural poor can profit from farming by producing the right products of the right quality at the right time for the right markets.