Regional Markets

1 Introduction
The challenge is to design agricultural value chains in developing regions so that the
desired economic, social, and environmental goals are reached. To respond to this challenge,
researchers from the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), together with their colleagues
in the South, have been looking for cases that demonstrated good results in
terms of pro-poor agricultural income growth in commercial agricultural value chains.
A lot of attention has been paid to a particular type of value chains—high-value, niche
products that are exported to the North (tea, coffee and cocoa). 1 With this publication
we want to look at value chain development from a slightly different angle. Whereas
earlier efforts looked at promoting economic development from a niche value chain
perspective—i.e. adding value to particular products with strong export market potential,
such as shea butter or tropical fruits—here we explore whether a focus on local
production, marketing and consumption might also be a strong strategy for fostering
sustainable economic development. We will examine how people are working to
improve production, productivity and marketing of food grains (like maize and rice)
so that they can lift up local and regional economies. The case studies in Chapter 3
provide examples of local projects and/or programmes that explore these alternative
pathways to sustainable economic development and food security.
Earlier work in agricultural value chain development
In the past decade KIT has supported project partners to select cases, analyse them and
distil the basic principles of sustainable and fair value chain development from practical
experiences. The publication Chain Empowerment was the result of collaboration
with the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR) and Faida MaLi,
supported by the funding partners Cordaid, the Technical Centre for Agricultural and
Rural Cooperation (CTA) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands (see
KIT and IIRR 2006). It explored trade networks and how these could offer opportunities
for smallholders to improve their livelihoods. The book on Chain Empowerment
was followed by the publication Trading up (KIT and IIRR 2008), supported by the
Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation (ICCO) and Oxfam Novib,
which focused on governance issues within the value chain, and how these could be
arranged so that traders would act as agents for development. Another study, Value
chain finance, dealt with a key aspect of sustainable and fair value chain development:
the role of finance (see KIT and IIRR 2010). This topic was studied by KIT and IIRR,
with input from the Ford Foundation and a number of major Dutch NGOs (Hivos,
ICCO and Terrafina Microfinance) and the Triodos Bank. In a further collaboration
KIT, Agri-ProFocus and IIRR addressed another key aspect in the recently published
Challenging chains to change (KIT et al. 2012). This publication elaborates more on
1 See Chain Empowerment (KIT/IIRR 2006), the publication on supporting African farmers to develop
market presence. Later, more specific aspects of value chain development and its pro-poor impact were studied, such as
the role of farmer organisations and that of finance (KIT/IIRR 2008, 2010).
11