2. Project Goal
The overall goal of the project was to achieve the development of environmentally and socially sustainable livelihoods for independent smallholder cotton farmers in Gujarat, rural India.

3. Livelihood Context & Challenges
The target beneficiaries of the project are small-scale subsistence farmers in Kutch and Surendranagar areas of rural Gujerat, India. Land parcels here are generally less than 20 acres (75% of participants fall into this category), classifying their farmers as ‘smallholders’. The main crop grown is cotton, using conventional methods including pesticides and fertilisers.

The livelihoods issues being faced by farmers here fall into the following broad categories:

Economic issues: Low incomes and economic vulnerability, particularly affected by seasonality. Income problem exacerbated by high levels of indebtedness, due to high interest rates charged on money borrowed to pay for fertiliser and pesticides. Bankruptcy a common occurrence.
Lack of market visibility and poor market access for agricultural production. Only a single market outlet in place at the start of the project – the local Agricultural Produce Marketing Corporations. Lack of direct access to consumers / other key domestic markets. Issue compounded by high transport costs for bringing product to the APMOs.

Social issues: rural-urban migration, worsening soil quality.

Environmental issues: crop vulnerability to pest attack and adverse climate.

4. Project approach and aims
The project involved both demand and supply-end functions; front-end product development and relationship building, but also the creation of complete supply chains capable of absorbing the costs of fair trade organic crops.
Agrocel developed and provided low-cost services to farmers in the form of agricultural inputs and other support services e.g. production planning, demonstration, buy-back of crops, etc. It also worked with a partner at the market end to establish a vertical supply chain on organic and fair trade principles. Vericott, a private-sector UK-based company worked to develop and market the ‘Agrocel Pure & Fair’ brand, and to develop end products for individual and business consumers. Traidcraft UK managed the project, also supporting the development and monitoring of fair trade standards, and supporting market linkages, along with its Indian partner, International Resources for Fairer Trade.

The key project aims can be summarised as follows:
• Stabilise livelihoods and increase incomes by approx. 10%
• Generate market access – grow the market from 100,000 finished textile products per year to 3M, and develop the market for the 500 tonnes of cotton waste by-product
• Stabilise water/soil quality - soil becomes less alkaline.
• Crop improvements - Longer staple length of cotton fibre, better lustre and whiter fibre
• Increases of trace elements in soil
• Agrocel cotton fibre brand established, product range developed and promoted to consumers and businesses
• Community cotton bank in operation and functioning effectively
• Reduce migration to cities
• Decrease indebtedness