Marumalarchy Agricultural Producer company (MAPC)

Background of Marumalarchy Agricultural Producer Company Limited - MAPC Ltd

Livelihoods form part of social, economic and political contexts. Institutions, social relations (consider here that majority of dalit families are landless), governance, and policies and policy practices such as markets, social norms, land ownership, access to resources, and other practices affect the ability of a household to access and use resources for beneficial results. All these factors are interlinked and capable of creating obstacles or opportunities for livelihood. Communities and all the other players, including the market - both the traditional and emerging, operate in this wider livelihood eco system.
The Producer Company and value chain or market linkage approach, which is currently considered as a better approach than the previous ones to improve the life and livelihood of marginal farmer families, may lose its preference soon in the sector, if the learning from such approaches are not broad-based.
In this background, a possible future direction is equal focus on community competency, mainstream linkages, and the livelihood context; perhaps working more on the livelihood context, that include policy environment, legal and regulatory framework, and the infrastructure. This is imperative as the mainstream resources and services are primarily determined by the existing policy context.

Integrating livelihood support with the rights approach: Market solutions for social problems or ‘making market work for the poor’ are apparently considered alien to the right based approach to livelihood. A right approach to livelihood and the market approach, though understood as conflicting positions are in reality integrally connected to each other. In fact, community competency and market linkages in a hostile policy environment have limited development scope.   With all efforts on competency building for increased production and market linkages, it is imperative to develop public policies, within a human right framework, to address the imbalance.

In fact, in livelihood development interventions, the right approach could not exclude the market solutions. Only such an integrated approach and interventions will enable and ensure a secure livelihood beyond the project impacts. Instead of shifting from one approach to the other, integrating the project learning of both the approaches into the programming processes is the challenge facing the development sector. Livelihood project learning should pave the way for enrichment and integration instead of creating parallel approaches.

Livelihood is the most relevant and central issue around which the right and market issues could be integrated, as there is no other important agenda for excluded communities than achieving their livelihood rights. In a way, such an integration effort could sustain the project impacts and also facilitate lasting changes in the livelihood eco system. It is critical to develop such a supportive environment, where communities, markets, linkages, and consumers work better to benefit all.

Initiate market engagements through communities as this is the aspirations emerging, and without the market engagements deriving more incomes from the value chain is impossible.  Engaging with markets/ market players is not easy, particularly for facilitating organisations that are working on the community side/ empowerment approaches.  However, there are plenty of opportunities in the sector wherein Producer Organisations / Companies are encouraged and this is an area that the project needs to plan to ensure sustainable increases in incomes for farmers, coming from the value chains.
Hence, the MAPC has been formed to increase the marketing opportunities and to give best prices for the agricultural produces for the farmers from the 5 Blocks of Virudhunagar District.

MARUMALARCHY AGRICULTURAL PRODUCER COMPANY LIMITED – (MAPC Ltd.)
Address : Kethanayakkanpatti Cross,  Narikudi Road, Tiruchuli - 626 129,Virudunagar  District.
(Company Initiated by Resource Centre for Participatory Development Studies-RCPDS)