Edible Agro

CONTROLLED COPY Edible Agro Products Limited: Creating Higher Value for Farmers. One Monday afternoon in July 2010, Ashok Agarwal, the director of Edible Agro Products Limited (EAPL) sat in his Kolkata office, his brows furrowed in confusion as he considered the production figures laid out before him. The reasons for his confusion were the production figures for the harvested produce of the new white sesame variety Gujarat Til-2 (GT-2) from Gujarat, a state in Western India (Exhibit 1). Keeping in mind the amount of sesame seeds he had supplied to the farmers, the harvested production was way below of his conservative expectation of yield of at least 200 times per kg of supplied seeds. He had started supplying this new variety in 2008, and this was the third consecutive year the yield had not met his expectations. At the beginning of the season in 2010 he had distributed 7000 Kg of GT- 2 to the state of West Bengal1 farmers. He had expected to receive a harvested produce of a minimum of 1400 metric ton. However, the report presented by the stores department proved that EAPL had received only 300 metric ton of harvested produce. Worse, some of the farmers who had considerable experience of sesame production had reported a lower yield of the new variety than local established varieties. EAPL, a West Bengal based company had been in the agri-business of trading oil including sesame oil. It entered in the trading of sesame seeds in recent past, and dealt with all types of seeds other than white seeds. In 2006, Agarwal attended an international conference on sesame in China. Agarwal learned about significant benefit of white sesame over Brown sesame in that seminar. His entrepreneurial acumen sensed an opportunity and scope for a sustainable social entrepreneurial venture. He asked himself ‘what can I do to develop the farmers in West Bengal and give them higher value’. Agarwal's vision was to promote the advantages of white sesame in West Bengal. He knew that the