Agriculture and food

The Agriculture and Social Sector (A&S) practice is closely aligned to PwC’s purpose “To build trust in society and solve important problems”. The 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development calls for global partnership amongst governments, businesses, academia, communities and individual citizens to end poverty and reduce inequality. The A&S practice provides advisory services and support to various stakeholders in this journey.

We have a track record of successfully delivering multiple assignments with development cooperation agencies such as UN agencies, Asian Development Bank, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), World Bank, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), European Union, KfW and GIZ. We also extensively work with governments at the national, provincial and local level to support policy and strategy interventions to address development agenda. In many instances, such support extends to implementation of schemes and programmes at the grassroots level. The progressive corporates and philanthropic foundations have also been our recent clients for advisory services to strategise their initiatives for sustainable development agenda.

The practice has over 150 in-house professionals coming from diverse backgrounds working together to serve the clients and deliver our purpose.

While we have significant geographical coverage of assignments in South Asia Region (India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Maldives), we have also undertaken advisory engagements supporting our network firms in South East Asia ( Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines), East and West Africa, Asia Pacific Islands and Latin America.

The A&S practice offers a broad set of service offerings, which are organised around three broad pillars:

Our Agriculture and Natural Resources consulting team aims at bringing profit and purpose to farmers while building and nurturing a sustainable agribusiness ecosystem. We have an experience of more than 10 years in India, South Asia and Africa in delivering engagements with multilateral and government agencies to introduce much needed reforms in the sector and design programmes that demonstrate success and create templates for replicating them on a large scale. Our engagements with the private sector focus on creating value for both businesses and farmers.

We provide advisory services to organisations in sectors such as farmer-producer organisations, food processing, commodity trading, agricultural credit, irrigation, integrated resource management, farm inputs, farm automation and agri-infrastructure.

We recognise the role of non-agriculture activities in supplementing the income levels of farmers and work extensively in the areas of horticulture, live-stock and fisheries.

We help governments and organisations to look at the bigger picture, by striking a balance between staying competitive, driving innovation and preserving our environment. We have extensive experience in the areas of climate policy and NDC implementation, environment impact and risk assessments, climate risk and vulnerability assessment, climate change adaptation and disaster resilience, climate finance and market mechanisms, corporate sustainability, responsible and sustainable supply chain, etc.

We are working with businesses, governments, the financial community and other stakeholders to support their commitments to achieving Net Zero emissions. Recently, we have been supporting our clients in the embarkation of their ESG journey from strategy to transformation.

Our Social Sector Consulting team supports its clients in achieving development outcomes for vulnerable sections of the society in a more equitable, effective and efficient manner. The key thematic areas covered within the practice are public health and nutrition, education and skills, livelihood, inclusive development and diversity and gender.

Our Social Sector Advisory Services team works in the areas of policy development, restructuring, organisational development, service delivery improvement, human resource management, feasibility studies, programme management and PPPs. We also work closely with our clients to monitor and evaluate the development initiatives, which feed into the future programme designs.

The team comprises qualified professionals and associates from different streams ranging from social studies, economics, finance, public policy, business administration to IT and engineering with national and international work experience and understanding of best practices in this domain.