Regional Markets

Regional Markets for Local Development
Of course, the interventions presented here as cases most often try to change the situation
found on the ground and deemed unsatisfactory for poor farmers. Most cases show
a tendency to shift to the quadrants marked by improved organisation generally: from
market to group action, or from hierarchy to network. Moving from the right to the left
(i.e. weakening of organisation) does not seem very plausible and does not appear in
the figure. Also, we did not record any shifts from left to right in our set of cases—even
though in real life this may happen often—when processors and traders start to dominate
the market and control the producers (regardless of their degree of organisation).
A shift from one quadrant to another implies changes in more than one aspect (organisation
of farmers, stronger position of producers etc.). Considering the scores of the
cases on the themes described above, we would expect that other aspects also change
when cases develop in a certain dimension. For example, improving infrastructure and
improved links to export market facilities will not remain an isolated change. Other
aspects will also change, such as governance, gender, etc. How this change happens
is dependent on individual circumstances—each change in the value chain will yield
expected and unexpected consequences.
In most cases, ironically, NGOs assisting value chain actors to improve their position
and income have focused interventions at the level where there is limited value addition:
most often, attention is being placed on the role of and benefits for small-scale
producers at the start of the value chain. Similarly the cases in this book largely reflect
the view of these networks or organisations that see it as their task to make markets
accessible and profitable for small-scale producers. At the producer level, the cases
show a strong focus on small-scale producers (usually owning less than 2.5 hectares,
and quite often less than 1 hectare). In practice small-scale producers dedicate some of
this limited land to food production for domestic consumption. Because of their small
volume of production, individual farmers are not in a very powerful position in relation
to processors or traders. Most projects, therefore, focus on improving the negotiating
position of these producers (rather than on increasing productivity), usually by organising
producer groups to improve market presence and strengthen negotiating position.
Ironically therefore, most effort is put in a situation where the position of producers is
weakest, and improving along dimensions that imply the largest effort.
This effort is undertaken with different degrees of sophistication, and it remains to be
seen whether it is possible to achieve the goal of empowering smallholders without
massive and extended external funding. In the examples where the external funding
was relatively small, the NGOMA case in western Kenya for instance, we see persistent
but only limited impact. Without external support, it seems to be quite difficult to build
up a strong farmers organisation that can successfully lobby against established forces
in the market in any short period of time.
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