It is evident that market-oriented agriculture is an essential factor for Sri Lanka’s agricultural development and for increasing the income and livelihood of farmers.
Accordingly, the “Small holder Horticulture Empowerment and Promotion” (SHEP) which is a market-oriented agricultural extension approach program introduced by Japan, is currently being successfully implemented over 60 countries of the world.
The SHEP program is being implemented in Sri Lanka from 2023 under the project “Livelihood Enhancement of Small and Medium Scale Agri Producers through Strengthening Supply Chain Structure (JICA SHEP&SSC)“. The project is being implemented by the Department of Agriculture together with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). With the objective of promoting Market oriented agriculture in rural areas and strengthen supply chains in the target areas the project is being successfully
implemented as a pilot program in 5 districts namely Nuwara Eliya, Badulla, Monaragala, Anuradhapura and Matale.
The SHEP approach is an agricultural extension approach that empowers small-scale farmers by building the capacity to run farming as a business by providing them with the necessary market and production skills while helping them become self-motivated. Finally, farmers’ behavior is expected to change from “Grow and sell” to “Grow to Sell”.
In this project, the period from July 2021 to March 2022 was used as a planning phase and a succesful project plan was prepared jointly by government departments, Japanese experts, universities, private sector organizations and farmers. The plan is currently being implemented successfully and it will be implemented until December 2025.
In the year 2023, the project was implemented with 12 target farmer groups in the districts of Anuradhapura, Badulla and Nuwara Eliya and so far, these farmer groups have developed into successful farmer groups engaged in market-based agriculture. Out of which several farmer groups are now using their own brands to sell vegetables for the market. This year too, the project will be implemented with 33 target farmer groups selected from the five districts of Anuradhapura, Badulla, Nuwara Eliya, Matale and Monaragala.
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