inclusive business

This report argues that better agriculture regulations in low and middle income countries could go a long way towards feeding the world’s growing population and improve farmers’ livelihoods around the world. The report states that, while many countries are already home to strong, commercially-oriented agriculture, more needs to be done. »

Increasingly, value chain approaches are integrated with multi-stakeholder processes to facilitate inclusive innovation and value chain upgrading of smallholders. This pathway to smallholder integration into agri-food markets has received limited analysis. This article in the The European Journal of Development Research analyses this integration through a case study of an ongoing smallholder dairy development programme in Tanzania. »

This report by Fairfood and CNV Internationaal identifies a host of interventions that will improve the situation of farmers in the vanilla value chain in Madagascar. The report examines the riches that vanilla production delivers, and the abject poverty many vanilla farmers experience. Vanilla is one of the most expensive and widely exported spices in the world, yet the large majority of the 80,000 smallholder vanilla farmers do not see this reflected in their income and are often even unable to provide food for themselves and their families. »

This analytical guide by CSM shows in what way 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. The authors argue that the policy recommendations illuminate the relationships of smallholders to markets in two main ways. »

This toolkit by IFAD provides guidance on developing sustainable partnerships with farmers’ organizations (FOs) within IFAD projects that consider FOs as relevant partners and not simply as beneficiaries of IFAD-funded activities. Given the complexity and diversity of both country contexts and FOs, the toolkit is not intended to be rigidly prescriptive. Rather, it provides an overview of the different approaches IFAD uses when building partnerships with FOs for the purposes of designing its strategies and programmes and implementing IFAD-supported projects. »

This working paper by UNU-WIDER, aims to bring evidence to the debate around the impact of large commercial farms on neighbouring smallholders in low-income sub-Saharan Africa. The findings point to significant heterogeneity in the local economic effects of commercial farms rather than any kind of automatic spillover effects. The implication is that a more nuanced policy position is demanded with respect to promoting rural dynamism through new commercial models. In particular, the creation of suitable incentives for and regulation of outgrower schemes needs to be a priority. »