USD 25 Trillion opportunity! I’m not joking

This was a meeting I would cherish for years to come! We all know about meetings.. most of them are drab, boring, same powerpoint enabled monologues.. But this was different..

I met this gentleman from Vietnam – a small time agriculture trader, a 2nd generation businessman. One wouldn’t give him a second glance if he were to pass by you. To give him good company, I kept speaking about India, Indian economy blah blah.. and he gave muted response to my exihilarated responses. But through his muted conversations he taught me how important it is to dream big! And dream really BIG!!
A small time agri-trader looking at raising capital from alternate investment markets (AIM) to the tune of 1.5 billion USD. For what damn it? I mean you suddenly get up one fine morning and want to invest more than a billion! Guess this man wasn’t that insane. So he actually sketched out the farm->to-> fork model by which he would integrate all disparate links in the food supply chain. All of this in Vietnam and in some parts of Indonesia.
An alternate market, an alternate stock exchange was in some way empowering the smaller constituents of the trading community to chart a quantum leap from their norms. Just think about it. We have about a 250 million farmers (approximate headcount) in India. Assume that the top 25 % are the richest lot who have access to capital and resources. To them alternate market is not priority.
But just segment the next 30-40 % of the middle class farmer segment. We are talking of a market size of 90 million farmers who find it exteremely difficult to access capital and thereby languish in the regime of poor infrastructure and low productivity. A dead, vicious cycle. I am assuming just 5 % of this segment falls in the “DREAM BIG” category. So that is about 5 million farmers who are the enterprising lot. Now assume each of them is dreaming to raise just 5 million USD (not much.. just about 25 crores). So tapping the alternate / impact investment exchange a total capital of 25 trillion USD. That’s more than twice the GDP of United States of America… You get what Iam driving home??

USD 25 trillion is 20 times India’s GDP. We should be proud of the fact that we are agri-heavy country and thanks to the hard work of our farmer community we have progressed thus far. It’s just that the government has remained oblivious to the needs of the farmer. He doesnt have access to state-of-art infrastructure nor capital to reach the size of my client from Vietnam.

Is anyone listening?