Women’s voice and agency in “organized” vegetable clusters: The Agriculture Production Cluster (APC) program in Odisha, India

Narayanan, Sudha; Belton, Ben; Mishra, Bhumika; Anowar, Md Sadat

Women’s voice and agency in “organized” vegetable clusters: The Agriculture Production Cluster (APC) program in Odisha, India

Autores

Editor

International Food Policy Research Institute

Descripción

A key policy tool for inclusive agrifood system transformation has been organizing women farmers into collectives. This is especially important for diversifying production into high-value sectors such as horticulture and livestock. Empirical evidence from around the world shows that some of these efforts can be transformative, but the impact is mixed and can involve tradeoffs (Malhotra et al. 2024; Quisumbing et al. 2021; Twyman et al. 2022). The extent to which programmatic interventions can enable inclusive and sustainable value chain participation thus depends on specific design principles. These includes the selection of commodities, bundling of interventions that tackle multiple constraints simultaneously, the presence of committed staff and champions for effective implementation, and a pathway to institutionalize these interventions (Narayanan et al. 2024, for example). In contrast to clusters that develop spontaneously, where incentives and supportive institutions may be present already and may have spawned these clusters to start with, the viability of organized clusters depends crucially on these inputs. In this note, we bring together qualitative and quantitative data from a larger research effort (See Project Note 1) to spotlight the experiences of women farmers in organized clusters in the Indian state of Odisha. We focus on the Agriculture Production Cluster Program (APC). The goals of our research are to understand how organized clusters can foster and support diversification into vegetable cultivation. A second goal is to understand women’s experience in vegetable production within these clusters. A third goal is to reflect on the broader design and implementation of the APC program and its sustainability in a context where many cluster interventions are known to implode or fade after the program ends (Belton et al. 2025; Narayanan et al. 2025).