Seventh Five Year Plan (7FYP).

The policy document is a Five Year Plan with a sectoral approach. The scope of the Plan is national. The timeframe of the Plan is five years (2016-2020). The major objectives of the Plan are to develop the crop sub-sector to raise rural income and create jobs for rural poor people, to ensure food and nutritional security and poverty reduction. The plan also aims to produce more food for an increasing population and to develop agricultural production system into a more dynamic, market oriented and sustainable commercial sector.
Constitutionally, the government has to protect the fundamental rights of the people enabling access to safe and nutritious food adequately and sufficiently corresponding to the tradition and food habit of people. Legislative protection is needed to ensure the implementation of the access and right to food. The government will adopt a “Food For All” policy to obtain access and right to food.
The Plan sets forth several aspects to make agriculture more productive and sustainable. Firstly, the Plan aims at ensuring sustainable intensification, diversification and commercialization of agriculture. The Plan addresses intensification in agriculture in an integrated way across the related sub-sectors such as crop diversification is considered not only for increasing productivity but also for enabling human nutrition and soil health. The Plan aims at attaining self-sufficiency in food grain production along with increased production of other nutritional and high value crops; at ensuring sustained agricultural growth through more efficient and balanced utilisation of land, water and other resources; at encouraging more use of surface water for irrigation and reduce pressure on groundwater to promote increased agricultural production. The Plan also commits to make agricultural production environmentally sustainable. It encourages wider women participation in homestead based agricultural production, post harvest management, agro/food processing, marketing and decision making for ensuring women empowerment.
One of the objectives of the Plan is to reduce rural poverty. Knowledge and skill gap of farmers is identified as the main reason for yield training gap so capacity building and skill developing trainings is to be imparted to farmers, traders and entrepreneurs. The Plan also aims at increasing productivity and real income of farm families in rural areas on a sustainable basis. The Plan further sets forth that capacity building will be targeted at all segments of agriculture through knowledge and skill development.
The Plan states that meeting future demand can only be possible through dissemination and adoption of demand meeting agricultural technologies along with a viable supply chain linking farmers with the buyers/consumers both at the domestic and overseas. Encouraging agricultural growth requires various policies ranging from applying new technology and extension services to providing credit to small farmers. Poor development of market chain and unstable market price of agricultural products discourages farmers to produce more. Agricultural market management system needs to be strengthened, transport, storage and processing facilities for agricultural commodities need to be improved. Low investment in Agricultural Research and Development hinders agricultural development and growth; both public and private sector investment in agriculture should be increased to a standard level. The Plan aims partnership among the public-private and international organizations to make sustainable agriculture work. It sets forth the institutions which will organize training and demonstration for farmers on agricultural, social and environmental development in their technology transfer process. In addition the Plan states that the integrated pest management program will be expanded.
Whereof increasing the resilience of livelihoods to disasters, the Plan sets out that The National Sustainable Development Strategy (NSDS) has been suggested to face and meet the environmental challenges in the way to development. The challenges are: degradation of agro-ecosystem, rivers and wetlands, coastal environment and urban environment, degradation and depletion of ground water; deforestation and desertification in different parts of the country.
The Plan gives a role to the Government that it would continue its pro-active role in delivering key public goods, technology and technical know-how in agriculture, particularly in improving the ability of farmers to adopt new technology and providing appropriate mix of incentives to pursue profitable and market oriented operations. Further the Plan states that Under present practices, both organizational and program development is headquarters based. Agricultural research and extension, both need to be decentralized to address location specific problems and issues, and also for quicker decision making. To this effect, outreach facilities to be developed/improved and used effectively.