Syngenta to help build India’s free AI-powered farm advisory platform for 150 million smallholder households

The French Riviera may not seem like an obvious place to talk about Indian monsoons, except this year, designated as the India-France Year of Innovation. At an event in Nice, attended by India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and France's President Emmanuel Macron, Syngenta signed a Memorandum of Understanding to help India achieve an ambitious goal: building a nationwide agricultural intelligence backbone for its farmers, most of whom are smallholders.

Syngenta is becoming a strategic partner in Annam.AI, a program with a simple premise and a vast scope: To give every farmer in India free, real-time, personalized agricultural intelligence.

Syngenta's contribution sits at the program's scientific core. Its R&D and digital capabilities will build the crop health, pest forecasting and heat stress models that the advisories run on, as part of its commitment to ensuring smallholder farmers and emerging markets are not left behind by the growing impact of technology on agriculture.

India is one of the world's leading producers of rice and wheat, with vast arable land, diverse agro-climatic zones and rich biodiversity. Yet its farmers contend with erratic monsoons, severe droughts and unseasonal rains compounded by El Niño, and pests and diseases that destroy an estimated 30 percent of crops every year.

More than 80 percent of the country's estimated 150 million farming households work less than two hectares of land, limiting economies of scale and slowing the adoption of advanced technologies that larger commercial operations have easy access to.

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Memorandum of Understanding signing. Left to right: Shubhang Shankar, Managing Director, Syngenta •⁠ ⁠Prof Dr. Rajeev Ahuja, Director, IIT Ropar. Hon'ble Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of Commerce and industry India, GoI. Prof. Ajay Kumar Sood, Principal Scientific Advisor, GoI. Anne Azam, Head of CU Crop Protection and Field Crop Seeds, Syngenta. Kiran Joseph, Digital Business Enablement Lead Europe, Syngenta

For these smallholder farmers, agricultural intelligence delivered at scale could be a fundamental leveller of access to technology. AI will provide them a fighting chance to compete with industrial-size operations cultivating thousands of hectares.

Syngenta's own research, conducted with the market research firm IPSOS, has examined what it would take for AI to close that gap. The study identified three conditions: accessibility, affordability and local trust. Technology that is free, built as a public good, delivered in a farmer's own language and grounded in local conditions clears all three by design. Annam.AI is built on similar principles.

Through Cropwise, its digital farming platform, Syngenta already provides Indian farmers, many of whom can’t afford an agronomist’s counsel, with tailored advice accessible in their own local languages, and easily viewed on their mobile devices.

Annam.AI extends that kind of capability to national scale, on open data, as public infrastructure. The vision is a nationwide agricultural intelligence backbone built on open data: hyperlocal, AI-powered advisories that integrate crop intelligence, real-time microclimate data and multilingual engagement tools, enabling precision agriculture and building climate resilience.

"At Syngenta we're creating breakthroughs for farmers in every field, to deliver higher yields with lower impact," said Jeff Rowe, Chief Executive Officer, Syngenta Group. "Annam.AI presents a unique opportunity to contribute to a transformative, digital foundation for Indian agriculture that will benefit more than 600 million people in this country. We are deeply honored to work with many talented and committed people in India's government and universities, as well as with other innovation leaders in fulfilling this vision."

Annam stands for Alliance for Next-gen Nourishment through Agriculture Modernization. The acronym also means "food" in Sanskrit. The program is backed by the Government of India, supported by global technology partners like Google, and driven by IIT Ropar, a premier engineering university in Punjab.

For smallholder farmers, it will deliver data-driven forecasts that speak their language, pest alerts that arrive before the damage, advice tuned to their fields. Scaled across millions of households, this is what AI equity looks like.