NEW DELHI: Seeking to bring more and more small and marginal farmers on big platform as a joint entity, the Centre on Wednesday approved a scheme for formation and promotion of 10,000 new farmer producer organizations (FPOs) in the country with budgetary support of Rs 4,496 crore by 2024.Additional amount of Rs 2,369 crore will subsequently be used for hand-holding of these FPOs during 2024-25 to 2027-28 period, taking the total size of financial assistance to Rs 6,865 crore.The FPO helps small and marginal farmers join hands to scale up their farming operations for better access to quality input, technology, credit and market through economies of scale. It also helps them realise better price of their farm produce.Currently, there are over 3,000 FPOs in the country with majority of them being supported by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard). This number is always considered quite low, considering a fact that the total marginal and small farmers, having landholding size of up to five acres, account for over 85% of total farmers in the country."Support to each FPO to be continued for 5 years from its year of inception," said agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar while briefing on decision of the cabinet committee on economic affairs (CCEA).He said there would be three implementing agencies to form and promote FPOs, namely small farmers agri-business consortium (SFAC), national cooperative development corporation (NCDC) and Nabard.Under the scheme, the minimum number of members in FPO initially will be 300 in plain areas and 100 in north-east and hilly regions. Priority will be given for formation of FPOs in aspirational districts in the country with at least one FPO in each block of aspirational districts. Though the programme is open for all farmers irrespective of size of their landholdings, it will primarily benefit small, marginal and medium farmers if they come on board and scale up their operations.The ministry will allocate cluster/states to implementing agencies, which in turn will form the cluster based business organization in the states.The FPOs will be promoted under ‘One District One Product’ cluster to promote specialization and better processing, marketing, branding and export by FPOs. There will be a provision of equity grant for strengthening equity base of FPOs."The FPOs will be formed and promoted through cluster based business organizations (CBBOs) engaged at the state/cluster level by implementing agencies. The CBBOs will have five categories of specialists from the domain of crop husbandry, agri marketing/value addition and processing, social mobilisation, law and accounts and IT/MIS," said an official statement.