Contributions

FP2.5 Lessons learnt and unintended consequences

The rapid urbanization, digital revolution, value chain innovations, the emergence of inclusive business models and a renewed emphasis on nutritional security are presenting new opportunities for smallholders to produce nutritionally dense GLDC crops. For example, the rapid expansion of supermarkets in both Africa and Asia is creating new value chains that could connect smallholder producers with urban markets¹⁵⁶. Dryland ecologies offer a range of high value natural products whose development may be facilitated by globalization, providing access to niche markets for eco-friendly products that, by using trademarks, can earn premium prices¹⁵⁷. At a more local scale, emergency relief interventions can be designed to build new value chains around local produce and capacities¹⁵⁸.

However, powerful stakeholders and multiple intermediaries in value chains can skew benefits away from poor producers and provide few incentives to reduce environmental externalities^159,160. Alternatively, attempts to stimulate community-based rural agro-processing enterprises often struggle to build entrepreneurial capacity and often falter, or remain at a pilot scale, due to competition from the organized sector, a weak understanding of market demands or due to regulatory, policy and institutional issues that rural enterprises on their own are unable to tackle¹⁶¹. Even where value chains are established to link smallholder producers to markets, market failures (such as monopolies, illegal rent-seeking, excessive taxation, side-selling or withholding fair prices from women) can inflate end-user prices or deflate producer prices¹⁶².