AHMEDABAD: The three-day annual students' meet on agribusiness, "Amaethon 2006", organised by the students of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, will begin here on Friday on the underlying theme of "ignite change.''

According to Prof. Vinod Ahuja, chairperson of the postgraduate programme in agribusiness management, the meet was expected to come out with ideas to ensure remunerative returns to the farmers for their agricultural production.

He said the meet had identified agricultural marketing, commodities trading and agricultural financing as the main areas for change, which could help to improve the lot of the poor farmers even if they did not have the holding capacity to take advantage of the market trends. Several institutions and non-government organisations had created situations to eliminate middlemen in the value-added chain from the field to the urban markets to ensure maximum returns to the farmers and Amaethon 2006 could further suggest new models in this direction to achieve the objective.

The meet, jointly sponsored by the Gujarat State Seeds Corporation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the National Dairy Development Board, the State Bank of India, the ICICI Bank, and several other private agribusiness-based organisations, would provide a forum to the students to interact with the industry leaders making forays into the rural market.

It would include several agricultural-based contests among the students like ``Khoj", a market research contest; ``Saakar", business plan contest; ``Aakar", implementation-focused business plan contests; ``CommTrade", a commodity trading game; and "Agri-Gate", a rural marketing contest.

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