During Vijaya’s work with rural farmers over the course of two decades, she helped them search out potential livelihood options, develop village-based business plans or give them the confidence and training to organize themselves and explore micro-finance options for better business options. While they undertook all this – finding markets that were sustainable and long-term, not exploitative, fair-trade, always seemed to be the biggest problem. Then, when Vijaya moved back to Bombay after working across the country, she set herself the task of finding solutions for markets that wanted good quality organic certified/natural produce but had a problem sourcing reliable suppliers.
One of the key problems areas she was confronted with were small beekeeper societies across India producing different kinds of honey that never managed to reach urban markets. India’s diverse flora produced orange blossom, cardamom, litchi, sweet clover and various regional honeys. But the urban consumer was given only a single kind of uniform tasting honey.
Give that bees play a crucial role as pollinators in increasing productivity, a powerful idea began to take shape: what if farmers were trained to add bee boxes on farms to facilitate cross-pollination AND provided markets to sell the honey collected?
The Bees for Poverty Reduction Strategy started taking shape………………
Our research showed that the first National Commission on Agriculture (1976) had recognised this and outlined a roadmap to use beekeeping to increase agricultural productivity until 2000. However this avenue had never been given the importance it deserved.
