Regional Markets

4 Opportunities for development
In the Bangladesh case, the external support is considerable, and there are more substantial
changes at both the level of organisation and the impact on smallholder income. The
farmers unions that are set up also own the facilities. Groups of farmers are upgrading
their activities within the value chain through acquiring ownership of processing capacity
through their farmers organisations. This shows the usefulness of these unions in
organising farmers not only to have a stronger position in the market, but also a qualitative
change in the role of farmers as processors. However, it also shows the external
dependency. On a positive note, this means that improving farmers’ roles in a commercial
environment can still be achieved with the support of public (external) money.
A third example is the groundnuts case in Senegal. Here, the participating women
dedicate most of their land to this one crop and operate on a very small scale (as access
to land is a problem). They are being organised into groups and supported by the
ActionAid project in Senegal to strengthen their negotiating position. In this case, productivity
is being improved and the position of the women producers is being upgraded
within the value chain, in the sense that groups have access to and control over processing
and trade.
These cases underscore the strong focus placed on farmer organisation as a tool for
achieving impact (economies of scale, innovation, social goals, etc.), both at the level of
the individual members and community. Farmers groups can reap substantial benefits
from engaging in activities higher along the value chain, in an upgrading process aimed
at increasing their control over trade, processing and retail sales.
Facilitating the upgrading processes at the level of farmers organisations—establishing
the organisations, improving member productivity, but also increasing the control these
organisations have on the later stages in the chain—can be challenging. When producers
upgrade they also encounter increased competition, which often complicates their
further development. In the TAHA case for example, this challenge seems to be internalised
within the organisational structure. Both the larger farmers, who export directly,
and the small scale farmers, who rely on the large farmers’ processing and export channels,
are members of the same organisation. Even though there is a clear policy of supporting
all members, the large farmers have a clearly stronger position within TAHA.
Upgrading farmers may put them in competition with each other therefore, but also
with existing processors. This may take place even when their improved produce finds
only one processor to supply to (in the matrix, the upper right cell labelled Hierarchy).
We assume actually that this situation is found: a company supports farmers to upgrade
their production, but is (or wants to be) the only processor to which the farmers can
(or must) supply. This dilemma is particularly evident in the case of the banana subsector
in Zimbabwe. Matanuska wanted to capture a larger share of the unmet market
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