The 2026 Food Planet Prize Goes to Two Million Farmers—India

The Curt Bergfors Foundation has awarded this year’s $1.5 million Food Planet Prize—the world’s largest environmental award for food system transformation—to the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming programme in India.

The Work

Out of more than 1,000 nominations worldwide, APCNF was chosen for something rare: proof at scale. Since 2015, the programme has reached 1.76 million farmers across nearly 8,200 villages, with verified results—farmer incomes up 38 to 66 percent, water use down by half, and greenhouse gas emissions reduced by up to 46 percent per acre.

Why It Matters

What makes APCNF worth paying attention to is its structure. The programme is women-led, community-managed, and built on the knowledge of farmer scientists rather than imported solutions. It didn’t arrive from outside. It grew from the land and the people who tend it.

The results read like an argument for everything Field Office believes about place-led practice: that deep local knowledge, when captured and circulated, creates outcomes no top-down system can replicate. Monocultures becoming agrobiodiversity. Water scarcity becoming water security. Farmer distress becoming farmer prosperity.

The recognition belongs, as the programme’s own statement says, first and foremost to nearly two million farmers—and to the women’s self-help groups, community resource persons, and farmer scientists who turned a vision into a people’s movement.

Support This Work

→ The Food Planet Prize is awarded annually by the Curt Bergfors Foundation in Stockholm.

→ Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming