How to Build Nature-Inspired Agri Value Chains

In a forest near Haridwar, Uttarakhand, beekeeper Meera tends to her hives as generations before her has done. As the surrounding forest thins, her concerns grow: what does this mean for her production, her livelihood, and the hundred-plus farmers in her collective? For Meera, the value of honey is inseparable from healthy ecosystems, thriving pollinators, and inherited beekeeping knowledge. Yet, much of this value remains invisible across the supply chain.

The Hidden Value

This points to a deeper reality. Across India, from medicinal herbs of Uttarakhand to turmeric of Assam, and aromatic rice of Uttar Pradesh’s Tarai belt, traditional produce has always been rooted in the ecological integrity of the landscape, indigenous knowledge that communities have held and passed down over generations and the distinctive health and cultural qualities these native varieties carry. These values -natural, social and human - run through every stage of the value chain from aggregation to marketing. Yet they remain instinctive to producers often unrecognised by the value chains that depend on them.

For farmers and forest dependent communities, this understanding is generational. What has changed is the mounting ecological and socio-economic pressures that make the costs of ignoring traditional values systems increasingly visible. In response, good practices are emerging - from regenerative agriculture to agroforestry and community-managed forest landscapes - all working in harmony with nature while generating livelihoods.

Can existing institutional architecture, natural resource base and traditional knowledge be leveraged to build sustainable, resilient and nature-positive agri-enterprises at scale?

The Gap

Although various approaches and good practices have existed, they are not mainstream. Cumulatively 60 lakh hectares are under organic farming (mobilising 48 lakh farmers), but this represents only a few percent of India’s net sown area. The gap between policy intent and adoption suggests that scaling requires stronger enabling conditions - accessible certification, aggregation systems for dispersed small-holder producers, procurement mechanisms that distinguish nature-positive produce, and market incentives that reward stewardship over yield alone. While farmers may choose sustainable practices, if their value chain does not reward what they protect, the incentives are likely to dissolve at the point of sale.

The need is to bring the natural, social, and human value back into the value chain by building systems that reward that difference. This matters for the grassroots communities whose livelihoods depend on nature, and for the 84% consumers seeking health and safety through clean labelling, credible certification and clear communication of product benefits.

Conditions for Change

Three practical dimensions must work in tandem, from grassroots to markets.

First, farmer collectives (farmer producer organisations and other similar collectives) must build capacities to measure and value what

their systems depend on and impact. This means tracking soil health, pollinator activity, water retention, community employment, nutritional and cultural outcomes. This accounting of natural, social, and human capital values can enable branding, credit, market positioning.

Second, in order for what is rewarded at the market end to reach the producer in a way that sustains the practice, evidence must influence the design of the larger value chain, including procurement criteria, traceability systems, certification, and incentive structures like premium pricing, long-term sustainability commitments, landscape-level investments, and innovative financing.

Third, an enabling environment that facilitates transition across the value chain must be established. This includes standards, data linking producers with consumers, finance commitments, institutional mechanisms and aligned policy frameworks. Although policies and regulatory frameworks exist to ensure farmers’ welfare and safeguard consumers’ interests, these ideas must adapt to evolving market and ecological realities. Businesses can no longer view sustainability as limited to their own operations; their interactions with nature, climate, and communities influence how well they perform. The ‘true cost of doing business’ must be reconsidered given these interdependencies.

None of these dimension’s work in isolation. A collective with strong evidence base but no market pathway remains a pilot. A brand with nature-positive commitments but no producer capacity to verify them remains a label. A policy or programme disconnected from community realities and market needs risks remaining symbolic rather than transformative.

An Evolving Business Strategy

The question remains: how can businesses treat nature and biodiversity not as an externality, but as the foundation of long-term value? Moving this from the margins to the core of business strategy requires making dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities visible and measurable, equipping producers to demonstrate what they protect, and enabling markets and policy systems to recognise and reward it.

Working Towards This Shift

Enabling this shift requires tools and approaches that make nature’s values visible in economic decision making. The TEEB for Agriculture and Food framework provides one such pathway. Since 2019, the initiative has been advancing this approach in the states of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Assam.

Currently, the initiative is strengthening the capacities of farmer producer organisations and companies to measure their dependencies and impacts across capitals and, to demonstrate the value of what they produce in verifiable terms. These insights are informing value chain development and incentive mechanisms to sustain and scale best practices, with the potential to drive landscape level change and create long-term impacts and enabling conditions where incentives are shaped by evidence of value rooted in community realities.

At the heart of this effort is bringing farmer collectives, industry, and decision-makers together to explore ways to sustain the natural base while generating viable livelihoods and shared gains. These conversations reveal the interdependencies embedded within value chains: the health of Uttarakhand’s forests in the quality of honey reaching consumers; the ecological knowledge of Assam’s farmers in the medicinal value of turmeric; and the soil integrity of Uttar Pradesh’s Tarai belt in the nutritional value of Kala Namak rice.

By making these relationships visible, we can build value chains that not only draw from nature and communities, but also recognise, reward, and regenerate them for future generations.

(The views expressed by the authors are personal)