Connecting smallholders to markets: an analytical guide
This analytical guide (PDF) by CSM shows in what ways policy recommendations illuminate the relationships of smallholders to markerts. The guide examines how small-scale food producers’ organisations and allied civil society can use the recommendations in their national and international advocacy and how they can work together with their governments to apply them in the context of national and regional policies and programmes. Connecting Smallholders to Markets’ is the title of policy recommendations negotiated on 8- 9 June 2016 in the Committee on World Food Security, the foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform deliberating on is- sues of food security and nutrition. Work on this topic has been underway since 2014. The authors argue that the policy recommendations illuminate the relationships of smallholders to markets in two main ways: i) they recognize that the bulk of food is channelled through markets linked to local, national and regional food systems (‘territorial markets’), thereby clearly positioning these markets as foremost amongst different kinds of market systems in the context of food security and nutrition; ii) they urge governments to employ public policy to support of these territorial markets, both by strengthening territorial markets where they already exist and by opening up new spaces for these markets to take root and flourish. With such an approach, smallholders would be well equipped to meet global challenges ahead.