Strand

Owned by Ashu Sikri (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Sept 13, 2021
2 min read

Notes from July 2020

  • Prabhakar Rajgopal (prabha.prabhakar@gmail.com)

  • Strand is focused on building technology platforms for conservation development and sustainable agriculture. Strand has built the India Biodiversity Portal which is a participatory and collaborative platform for aggregating biodiversity information on India. The platform technology is open source, and all data is provided as open data.

  • Strand has been working on triple certification platform; including traceability; eco-certification and fair trade certification. This project is in collaboration with CIRAD, and is focused on building the platform for certification for coffee cultivation in Uganda with NUCAFE, a producer cooperative in Uganda.

  • It may be worthwhile to collaborate on the certification process for better transparency and enabling better value and access of small growers to organic markets.

  • The idea of building a generic platform for implementing the Participatory Guarantee System for organic certification may be a good project to work on with linkages with markets though an e-com platform. 

  • An interest in local varieties and cultivars of food plants and ec=ncouraging it conservation and sustenance will also be a good area to engage. 

  • Prabhakar is excited about the potential for a Participatory Governance System approach to organic certification and is looking for opportunities to pilot. 

  • The basic idea is to have an alternative to the intl third party certifications where small holder farmers work with other local stakeholders (govt bodies, consumers, etc.) to define their own set of certification criteria and verification is through peer appraisal. The min group size is 5 and all members need to be fully organic to receive the mark (there is a "in process" status as well). Goal is to be cheaper and more inclusive than the intl standards drive awareness / education of the practices employed among local communities.  

  • Per IFOAM (Intl body based in Germany promoting organic practices) there are a number of global initiatives on PGS including many in India (see map). Prabhakar mentioned Keystone Foundation (see here) and BAIF (didn't see anything on their website...) have PGS programs. There is an official looking Dept of Ag and Farmer Welfare webpage (here) on the topic with operational manuals and org charts but not a lot of specifics.Â