Union Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has chaired the 16th BRICS Agriculture Ministers' Meeting in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. Held under India’s 2026 BRICS Chairship, this was the first-ever BRICS agricultural summit to include both Member and Partner Countries.
The BRICS Agriculture Working Group identified 4 priorities: Food Security and Nutrition (focusing on smallholder farmers, women, and youth), Agricultural Trade, Regenerative Farming (promoting climate-resilient practices), and Investment and Innovation.
The summit concluded with the adoption of the ‘Indore Declaration’, which emphasises a farmer-centric global food system and rejects unilateral trade restrictions that threaten food security.
To implement the declaration, the member nations established 5 institutional networks: the BRICS Network of Centres of Excellence on Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture (coordinated by the ICAR-Indian Institute of Farming System Research (IIFSR), Modipuram), Network on Digital Agriculture (coordinated by the IIT Delhi), BRICS Agro-Inputs, Genetic Resources, and Information Network (BRICS AGRIN Framework), Knowledge-to-Action Hub (by strengthening the BRICS Agricultural Research Platform (BARP)), and the Global Forum on Farmers' Rights in Seed Systems.
