Grameen Swapna

The global trend in rising food prices. The soaring cost of food is threatening millions of poor people in low income countries. Bangladesh is named in a recent report of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as one of the countries that will be the hardest hit due to increases in climate change related disasters, rising oil prices, and changes in food consumption. Although farmers are our food providers but farmer of Bangladesh are neglected and deprived. All the year round as they are unaware about their rights and do not know where is to go to get their rights. Their produced crops do not get fair price and most of the time they are exploited by middlemen. Most of the cases farmers cannot raise their voice collectively as they don’t have any platform. Grameen Swapna has stretched its supporting hand to remove the sad plight of the farmers, to ensure their rights and to make them united through ‘Access Creation and Association Building for Agricultural Development’ project. Grameen Swapna support the agricultural sector in Bangladesh includes a strong poverty reduction focus, together with special emphasis on poorer women, nutrition, marketing and environment. Support is provided to technology generation and delivery of essential services nearer to the farmers’ door steps. Marginal farmers need loan support for crop production. Grameen Swapna is providing support to farmer micro-finance, tools, seeds and skills training to marginal farmers, loan size ranges from BDT 10,000 to BDT 50,000

One of the fundamental rights of citizens stipulated in the Bangladesh constitution is food security for all. Food security exists when all people, at all times, have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to maintain healthy and productive lives. The key elements of food security are: availability of adequate food, access to food for all people at all times through adequate incomes and affordable prices, proper hygiene and sanitary practices and safe water for utilization of food to have optimum impact on health and nutrition, and a regulatory framework in place and its proper implementation for controlling contamination to ensure food safety. The main challenge for achieving and sustaining food security comes from continuing growth of population. The progress in reducing population growth, from three per cent per year at independence of Bangladesh to about 1.2 per cent now, is laudable. But the population is still increasing by 1.8 million every year. Grameen Swapna is organizing farmers (men and women) into village organizations (VOs) and providing them with both credit and training on modern agriculture under the Food Security program. With the ensuing food insecurity crisis, and the adverse effect of climate change on food production, Grameen Swapna has taken the initiative to explore large scale opportunities for increasing crop production, training farmers in agricultural techniques