Govt renews consultations with farmers for developing ADS

The government has started fresh consultations with local farmers and farmer´s groups in the mid- and far-western regions in order to collect their inputs for Agriculture Development Strategy (ADS), a long-term vision document that will chart the course of country´s agriculture sector for the next two decades.
Ministry of Agriculture Development (MoAD) started the consultations afresh after the government restructured the steering committee, incorporating farmers´ representatives, and decided to adopt field-based feedback approach to develop the ADS, scrapping the previous assessment report.
“The new steering committee, which was formed after intense protest from different farmers associations and civil society leaders, has completed consultations for fresh assessment in the two regions,” an official from the Ministry of Agriculture Development (MOAD) told Republica.
The committee would hold similar consultations with farmers in the other regions of the country soon, said Prabhakar Pathak, joint secretary at the MoAD.
Through the consultations, the committee is fundamentally generating farmers´ perspectives on areas wherein the government failed while implementing Agriculture Perspective Plan (APP): 1995-2015.
The APP, much-regarded as a reform-oriented vision document, had among others scrapped the government subsidy and promised reforms in supply chain of agricultural inputs and technology so that farmers could access quality fertilizers, seeds and equipments easily.
As concerned officials admit, APP remained a total failure in transforming the agriculture sector and farmers´ lives. Through the fresh consultations the committee hopes to generate new programs and inputs for future policy guidelines.
“We are raising issues such as land-reform, agriculture revolution and demands of farmers in the new consultation meetings,” said Prem Dhangal, general secretary of the Nepal Peasants Federation (NPF).
Meanwhile, referring to the complete restart of the ADS process and fresh consultations being held at different regional level, the MoAD has said that the budget allocated for the ADS will now be insufficient. The government had allocated US$ 2 million (about Rs 160 million) for developing ADS.
“The consultations also has raised the cost by Rs 2 million. Hence, we have requested the government to provide us with the additional sum that was not included in the previously planned budget,” said Pathak.
The government has received assistance from various donors, including Asian Development Bank, World Bank and United State Agency for International Development (USAID), among others, for developing the ADS.
The ADS, which will replace the APP, will deal on cross-cutting issues like irrigation, agriculture inputs and other crucial sub-sectors of the agriculture. “The APP failed to address the core problems of the farmers. We want to make sure ADS does not repeat the same history,” Dhangal said, referring to perennial scarcity of seeds and fertilizers in the country.