This Plan Vivo-certified Acorn project, run by our partner Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre (AFEC) in India, and currently supports almost 7,500 smallholder farmers across India’s Anantapur district.
The majority of smallholders in this Acorn project describe their financial situation as having just enough to get by, and in some circumstances farmers are experiencing financial hardship.
In the project area, most farmers’ financial state is poor, with a low per-capita income, due to the inadequate income from subsistence agriculture. This also leads to the inability to afford high investment costs and failures to access bank loans. As a result, farmers are highly dependent on cash crops for income and food crops for self-consumption.
These smallholders plant various annual cash crops, which, amongst the most productive, include groundnuts (peanuts), maize, sweet lime, mango, red gram, and tomato. However, the majority have unstable productivity, which has been the case for the past 10-12 years. The main reasons for unstable productivity include drought, high input and planting material costs, lack of shade, floods, pests, and diseases.
As an entirely agrarian area, the Anantapur district is particularly vulnerable to climate change with its arid, drought-prone conditions. Severe drought and soil erosion threaten an already vulnerable population. Low food productivity-induced poverty and the lack of non-agricultural employment opportunities force many men to migrate to urban areas to earn money for their families.
With over four decades of operation, AFEC is an NGO that has empowered Indian smallholder farmers through natural resource management, watershed development, drought management, environmental development and policy advocacy.
Starting in 2018, AFEC supported farmers in the region to transition to agroforestry and plant mangos, sweet limes, tamarind, and guava (among others) on their land, diversifying both their income and their diet, and opening up an opportunity to get connected to the voluntary carbon market for them to acquire additional income.
In collaboration with AFEC, the Acorn project is empowering farmers in 15 mandals (a local administrative unit facilitating self-government). This project aims to promote livelihood security, self-reliance, and human dignity for smallholder farmers. It does so by going through their institutions, encouraging women to lead, and promoting drought-climate resilient agroecology, agri-processing, and non-farm livelihoods.
AFEC has already organized community meetings, where local farmers familiarize themselves with agroforestry, appropriate plant species, and the concepts of carbon sequestration and carbon markets. With the Acorn project, farmers will receive the necessary skills and resources to overcome the productivity challenges they face, additional to the environmental benefits like improved soil health.
The project has already undertaken the following activities:
Click the links below to download the project's certification documents.
