What We Do

The Rupantar project will identify inclusive, diversified system opportunities in the EGP that are priorities for local communities, and fit with longer-term climate, nutrition, and available water resource projections. It will work at multiple levels to demonstrate how small changes on the ground scale-up; and also how high-level policies scale down and can be implemented in multiple ways.

Current food systems in the EGP do not provide most smallholder farmers with profitable livelihoods or the population of the region with the balanced diets they need, and they put pressure on natural resources. Food systems need to change to ensure that rural livelihoods are profitable and equitable, that the wider population can be supplied with nutritious diets, and to work within resource and climate limitations. Transformation of the food system requires viable technical options for smallholders, aligned with interventions for scaling that are supported by appropriate policies and sustainable resource use.

Rupantar builds on previous programs and projects in the EGP, including on the work undertaken within the ACIAR Sustainable Development Investment Portfolio program (www.aciarsdip.com) and other prior ACIAR investments in the region that have explored inclusive and sustainable intensification options and scaling approaches. It will coordinate with several existing ACIAR projects in Bangladesh as sites of cross-learning and to help identify opportunities to enhance their scaling approaches. The project will actively seek to connect with existing government and development programs at local, provincial and state levels to learn from and value add to their work. There is a strong existing network of local and regional partners who can both implement at local levels and engage with a range of change makers.

 

“The Eastern Gangetic Plains (EGP) of Bangladesh, India, and Nepal has the potential to become a major contributor to South Asian regional food security, but agricultural productivity remains low and diversification is limited because of poorly developed markets, sparse agricultural knowledge, and service networks, inadequate development of available water resources and low adoption of improved, sustainable production practices.”

— Brown et al., 2020; Erenstein et al., 2010

 

What We Aim to Achieve

  • Farmers will have the ability to transition to diversified farming systems that increase incomes, ensure equity in terms of access and impacts, and minimise risk.

  • Communities and local stakeholders will be able to better contribute to defining, planning, and implementing inclusive, sustainable, diversified pathways for the transformation of local food systems. Local partners will have enhanced capacity to facilitate and communicate with multi-stakeholder networks.

  • Development partners will have access to tools that allow them to analyse and adapt their existing models to improve scaling, and prioritise which technologies to promote, making their investments more effective.

  • Research partners will have deepened their skills in how to incorporate progressive policies with socially inclusive research approaches within a local context, and be able to these approaches to other areas of their work, meaning their programs will be more inclusive and better matched to local conditions.

  • Policy makers will be aware of how their policies are supporting or constraining diversification, and how implementation could be improved.