Farmer organization, collective action and market access in Meso-America

The Future of Small Farms

The new global and African food security agenda is overwhelmingly productionist and rural in its orientation, and is based on the premise that food insecurity is primarily a rural problem requiring a massive increase in smallholder production. This agenda is proceeding despite overwhelming evidence of rapid urbanisation and the growing likelihood of an urban future for the majority of Africans. Urban food insecurity can therefore no longer be ignored. This paper argues that achieving urban food security is the emerging development challenge for the 21st century and that the complexities of urban food systems urgently need to be addressed by researchers, policy makers, and international donors and multilateral agencies.

Urban food insecurity and the new international food security agenda

"The global agricultural economy is changing. Commodity prices are declining, and producers increasingly supply complex value chains. There is growing interest in how farmers can benefit from emerging market opportunities. Farmers are encouraged to produce high value crops and engage in value-adding activities such as agro-processing. Farmer organization and collective action are often seen as key factors in enhancing farmers' access to markets. Often too little attention is directed at a) the most appropriate types of organization, b) whether the public and/or private sector is best placed to support their formation, and c) the conditions necessary for ensuring their economic viability. This paper reports on research in Mexico and Central America that explored these issues for commodity maize and high value vegetables respectively. The benefits of farmer organization are more evident in the vegetable sector characterized by high transaction costs associated with market access. The research suggests that farmer organizations established by and directly linked to supermarkets may be more economically sustainable as opposed to organizations supported by non-governmental organizations. However, the most representative vegetable producer organizations in both Honduras and El Salvador include fewer than 5 percent of total horticultural producers. This is due to producer organizations' limited business skills and non-replicable organizational models for linking producers to markets. There is less incentive for maize farmers to organize themselves to access output markets as the transaction costs associated with market access are relatively low: there are so many buyers and sellers that farmer organizations would have little impact on, for example, prices. The benefits of farmer organization are clearer when it comes to accessing credit, seed, and fertilizer. Farmer organization is a critical factor in making markets work for the poor particularly in high value products, but the role and timing of the substantial public and private investment needed to establish and maintain these organizations is poorly understood." authors' abstract

Farmer organization, collective action and market access in Meso-America:

Dans le contexte de transition demo-economique en Afrique subsaharienne, l’evolution des strategies des menages ruraux vers des systemes d’activites composites et la reconnaissance des modalites renouvelees des migrations soulevent les enjeux lies aux recompositions des economies rurales. Cette these interroge le role renouvele des mobilites des menages ruraux mozambicains pour comprendre dans quelle mesure celles-ci constituent un element central de recomposition de leurs systemes d’activites dans le contexte regional postapartheid et de liberalisation.Ce travail apporte un eclairage sur les articulations conceptuelles entre approches institutionnelles en economie et la notion de circulation, pour une analyse du role des mobilites dans les strategies et systemes d’activites sur le long terme. La demarche analytique est basee sur la reconstitution par enquetes de biographies de 97 menages et combine methodes quantitatives et qualitatives.L’analyse met a jour l’evolution de mobilites circulaires intenses vers l’Afrique du Sud des familles de Leonzoane pendant la periode coloniale, vers des formes de mobilites plus complexes devoilant plus de flexibilite professionnelle, dans des espaces plus larges au sein et en dehors du secteur historique minier. Ces mobilites s’accompagnent d’une diversite d’arrangements portes par les reseaux, attestant d’un contrat migratoire en formation, fonde sur une ressource circulatoire dans les strategies des familles. La mise en regard de ces mobilites avec les recompositions des systemes d’activites des menages, met a jour une situation actuelle a Leonzoane tres diversifiee. Pour une partie elle donne lieu a la complexification des ajustements au sein des systemes d’activites dans lesquels le poids relatif de l’agriculture tend a diminuer, pour d’autres elle assure la reproduction de systemes d’activites tres stables non diversifies. Element fondamental des strategies des familles, la migration peut aussi bien constituer une ressource strategique qu’un facteur de precarisation ou de dependance

Le rôle complexe des migrations dans les reconfigurations des systèmes d’activités des familles rurales : la circulation comme ressource ? Localité de Leonzoane, Mozambique 1900-2010

-i-Executive Summary1. This paper makes a number of important propositions with respect to spatial dimensions of the quest for poverty reduction in low income countries. Some of these are to do with how we interpret notions of rural and urban, and the importance of mobility in contributing to positive processes of economic and social change. Others are to do with the limitations of sector-centred approaches to poverty reduction. Still others are to do with policy environments that inhibit and stifle mobility and exchange due either to wrong notions about their negative effects on the development process, or to generalised blocking behaviours that often seem to occur at the interface between public authority and private action.2. An overarching proposition is that mobility has overwhelming positive impacts on processes of change. This is equally true historically as it is today. It is mobility that ensures that labour supply meets labour demand at the junctions of economic systems in which dynamic forward momentum is occurring. It is also mobility that results in the interchange of new ideas across different locations, the acquisition of new knowledge and skills by those who move, the transfer of financial resources back from more dynamic to less dynamic areas, the potential to diversify livelihoods and thereby reduce livelihood risks and vulnerability in both urban and rural areas.3. In the context of mobility, it is useful to recognise that the descriptions urban and rural pertain to administrative boundaries that do not reflect patterns and flows of economic activity across space within national economies. Much modern industrial activity occurs in rural spaces: on green field sites, along transport corridors, at ports that may or may not be adjacent to large cities. Likewise, cities can contain significant agricultural activities, and service sub-sectors occur in both urban and rural settings.4. There are good reasons for caution regarding the resurgence in interest in agricultural technology as a contributor to poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa. We have been here before: agronomists working in Africa were no less enthusiastic than their Asia counterparts about the potential for high yielding varieties to act as a vehicle for poverty reduction in the 1970s. Rural families in Africa are heavily engaged in rural-urban interchanges, reflecting an array of disadvantages associated with undue reliance on farming: declining real output prices, limited markets, price instability, high climatic and market risk, absence of rural financial markets, declining farm sizes and so on. Better to build upon and facilitate workable rural-urban mobility than fall back on false expectations about the poverty reducing capabilities of farming on its own.5. Mobility is blocked and discouraged by numerous devices and behaviours in low income countries including permits, fees, fines,

Development Patterns, Mobility and Livelihood Diversification

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Development Patterns, Mobility and Livelihood Diversification