Inclusive and efficient value chains: Highlights, lessons learned, and priorities for one CGIAR


Book Description

At the start of CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) Phase 2 in 2017, and later during the priority-setting round in 2019, each of the PIM research areas (‘flagships’) formulated key research questions they aimed to answer and identified theories of change and pathways to achieve impact. In this series, we share highlights of what we have learned and achieved and suggest areas to be explored in the future.







Interventions for inclusive and efficient value chains: Insights from CGIAR research


Book Description

Efforts to promote the development of agricultural value chains are a common element of strategies to stimulate economic growth in low-income countries. Since the world food price crisis in 2007-2008, developing country governments, international donor agencies, and development practitioners have placed additional emphasis on making agricultural value chains work better for the poor. As value chains evolve to serve new markets, they tend to become less inclusive. For example, if a market for high quality rice arises within an economy, it is inherently easier for traders who sell rice to retailers to source that high quality rice from larger farms that are better able to control its quality than from dozens of smallholder farms. As a result, the normal path of value chain evolution can be biased against smallholders; hence, it is important to understand what types of interventions can make value chains more inclusive while also making them more efficient. In this brief, we summarize studies on five types of value chain interventions that were supported by the CGIAR’s Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) through its Flagship 3 on Inclusive and Effective Value Chains. Figure 1 illustrates a “typical” agricultural value chain, including the five intervention types (in orange). These include interventions that attempt to deal with multiple production constraints; certification; contract farming; public-private partnerships; and “other” services related to trading and marketing agricultural products. Apart from the last category, these interventions all involve production. This reflects the fact that smallholder producers can be considered, in some ways, the weakest link in evolving agricultural value chains (de Brauw and Bulte 2021). Hence, it is sensible to target interventions either at or close to smallholders. However, in some cases, the best way to overcome smallholder constraints may be to help actors at other points in the value chain overcome constraints. Many interventions share a focus on reducing transaction costs to promote smallholder market integration. Ideally, interventions increase both efficiency and inclusion, but we observe that such win-win outcomes are rare. Trade-offs appear to be more common than synergies, and some value chain interventions involve clear winners and losers.




Annual report 2021: CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)


Book Description

PIM had a productive final year centered on synthesizing findings while continuing to respond to demand on the impacts of COVID-19 and preparing the transition to the new CGIAR portfolio. PIM findings and engagement contributed to Myanmar’s response to COVID-19, South Africa’s policies on resilience to climate change, Tunisia's policies for pastoral development, a reform of Nigeria’s national agricultural research system, Ghana’s fish seed and farm certification system, gender strategies for three agricultural value chains in Honduras, and genome editing guidelines for the agricultural sector in four African countries. PIM research informed policy documents of FAO, IFAD, One CGIAR, the UK Government, the World Bank and the World Food Programme. PIM tools enabled more equitable co-management of 76 protected areas in Peru and informed World Bank social protection projects. Books on food security in Bangladesh and Malawi, trade in Latin America, African agricultural value chains and gender were published. 42 PIM synthesis briefs and notes were issued, summarizing research results in key thematic areas. PIM contributed 181 journal articles, 8 journal issues (on demand driven seed systems, China’s response to COVID-19, agriculture and food security in China under COVID-19, food loss and waste, landscape restoration, multistakeholder fora in forestry and two issues on gender), 15 book chapters and about 500 non-peer-reviewed outputs. 16 PIM webinars were organized. PIM’s contributions to the United Nations Food Systems Summit covered agricultural extension, food system innovations and digital technologies, the future of small farms, the science-policy interface, the cost of ending hunger by 2030, food waste and loss, management of the commons and gender. Building on past PIM investments in economywide modeling tools and social accounting matrices, PIM teams continued to assess the impacts of COVID-19 and policy responses at country level. Lessons learned from PIM country-level analyses on COVID-19’s impacts on food systems, poverty and diets are summarized in a chapter of the IFPRI 2022 book “COVID19 and global food security: Two years later”. A paper in partnership with the CGIAR COVID19 Hub reviewed the literature on agri-food value chains for evidence of fractures and resilience in response to the pandemic. The results of coordinated studies on the impacts of COVID-19 on value chains in different countries were published. Several cross-CGIAR outputs initiated by PIM speak to the fulfillment of PIM’s convening role as an integrating program: the CGIAR Foresight Report and CGIAR foresight website; several outputs produced through the CGIAR Community of Excellence on Seed Systems Development, and the CGIAR book “Advancing gender equality through agricultural and environmental research: Past, present, and future” are examples. Other examples of PIM global public goods produced in 2021 are 27 innovations at various stages of uptake, a cross-cutting effort to distill PIM lessons on migration; new or updated social accounting matrices for 25 countries; and lessons and tools on stakeholder platforms for natural resource governance. Independent reviews assessed the effectiveness of PIM’s partnerships and the use by partners of PIM’s work on economywide modelling, agricultural insurance, tenure and governance, and the Ag-Incentives database.







Innovation for inclusive value-chain development


Book Description

Governments, nongovernmental organizations, donors, and the private sector have increasingly embraced value-chain development (VCD) for stimulating economic growth and combating rural poverty. Innovation for Inclusive Value-Chain Development: Successes and Challenges helps to fill the current gap in systematic knowledge about how well VCD has performed, related trade-offs or undesired effects, and which combinations of VCD elements are most likely to reduce poverty and deliver on overall development goals. This book uses case studies to examine a range of VCD experiences. Approaching the subject from various angles, it looks at new linkages to markets and the role of farmer organizations and contract farming in raising productivity and access to markets, the minimum assets requirement to participate in VCD, the role of multi-stakeholder platforms in VCD, and how to measure and identify successful VCD interventions. The book also explores the challenges livestock-dependent people face; how urbanization and advancing technologies affect linkages; ways to increase gender inclusion and economic growth; and the different roles various types of platforms play in VCD.




Inclusive Value Chains


Book Description

Ch. 1. Poverty in India and value chains -- ch. 2. Retail winners and losers - the impact of organised retailing -- ch. 3. Inclusive value chains in fresh fruit and vegetables. Case study 1 : Namdhari Fresh Limited / BN Dhananjaya and A. Umesh Rao. Case study 2 : ITC Choupal Fresh / Rewa Shankar Misra. Case study 3 : INFAM in Wayanad, Kerala / Jacob D. Vakkayil. Case study 4 : Spencer's Retail / Sukhpal Singh -- ch. 4. Inclusive value chains in commodity crops. Case study 5 : Contract farming of potatoes : an attempt to include poor farmers in the value chain / Braja S. Mishra. Case study 6 : Basmati Rice and Kohinoor Foods Limited / Anup Kumar Singh. Case study 7 : Agrocel Industries / Anamika Purohit. Case study 8 : bioRe Organic Cotton / Rajeev Baruah -- ch. 5. Inclusive value chains in fisheries, honey, coffee and poultry. Case study 9 : Falcon Marine Exports / Rajeev Roy. Case study 10 : Honey in Muzaffarpur / Ashok Kumar. Case study 11 : Fairtrade and organic coffee / Priti Rao. Case study 12 : Small-holder broiler farming in Kesla / Anish Kumar -- ch. 6. Inclusive value chains in non-food artisan products. Case study 13 : ITC Limited and the Agarbatti Industry / Nagendra Nath Sharma. Case study 14 : Operation Mojari / Vipin Sharma and Mallika Ahluwalia -- ch. 7. What do the case studies tell us? Lessons for the future.




Advancing Gender Equality Through Agricultural and Environmental Research


Book Description

"Advancing Gender Equality through Agricultural and Environmental Research: Past, Present, and Future stands to become the new go-to resource on gender in agriculture. Bringing together contributions from more than 60 authors who expertly straddle gender research and agricultural science, it offers important insights for the wider agricultural research and development communities. A comprehensive synthesis of CGIAR gender research to date, it not only illuminates what we know - and what we don't yet know - about the contributions of gender research to development outcomes, but also, and especially, investigates the contribution of agricultural development to gender equality outcomes. The lessons emerging from this synthesis have important implications for work that supports countries to achieve their national development objectives, as well as for our collective approach to meeting global targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals"--




Mapping actors along value chains


Book Description




Access to markets for smallholder farmers in Alto Molócue and Molumbo, Mozambique: Mid-term impact evaluation of INOVAGRO II


Book Description

The Innovation for Agribusiness (InovAgro) project, which launched with its first three year phase in 2010, uses a market system development (MSD) approach towards the goal of increasing incomes of men and women small-scale farmers in northern Mozambique. InovAgro interventions promote improved agricultural productivity, participation in selected high-potential value chains and the development of inclusive and sustainable market systems, such that impacts are expected to last long beyond the termination of the project. This paper presents results from a midline quantitative impact evaluation of the second phase of the InovAgro project interventions (2014-2017). In it, we use a carefully designed and executed quasi-experimental study design to credibly attribute changes in market engagement and welfare of participating farmers to exposure to the InovAgro II project, identifying and testing in what respects the intervention was most successful, and what regard it had less impact. Although InovAgro II projects operate in 11 districts of Zambézia and Cabo Delgado provinces, this impact evaluation focuses on two districts in Zambézia province (Alto Molócue and Molumbo), and in terms of value chains, focuses on the soybean and pigeon pea high-potential value chains, while the InovAgro II project interventions focus on these in addition to maize, sesame and groundnut. A baseline survey was undertaken in 2015 covering the 2014/2015 agricultural season and a midline follow-up survey was conducted in 2017, covering the 2016/2017 agricultural season and reaching 1,749 households of the original 1,886 households interviewed in the baseline survey. Using difference-in-difference estimation and propensity score matching, we find that exposure to the InovAgro II project is associated with an increase in the proportion of households selling soybean and pigeon pea by approximately 5% and 16%, respectively (significant at the .01 level). Exposure to the InovAgro II project also results in significantly higher shares of smallholder farmers using improved seed for soybean and pigeon pea (an increase of 6% for soybean and 2% for pigeon pea). We find that the InovAgro II project is also associated with significant increases in access to agricultural output market information from formal sources (5%) and hired labor for farming activities (8%). Despite the significant impacts on short term outcome variables, exposure to the InovAgro II project had limited impact on long term outcome variables, such as on rural-urban migration as well as engagement in the non-farm sector (two proxies for assessing potential welfare implications of the project) however this finding is not surprising given the impact evaluation covers only two years-a short period of time to bring about the long-term impacts expected to eventually emanate from an MSD project.