Market access determines the income of agricultural households and incentivizes the cultivation of diverse crops. Markets in India are mostly unorganized with limited infrastructure limiting their ability to cater to quality requirements and specifications demanded by urban consumers. Therefore, parallel to traditional markets, direct linkages with farms and alternative markets based on electronic sales platforms, new commodity futures and warehousing systems are needed. In this chapter, the authors discussed the scope of small farms to effectively link to value chains and new marketing platforms. The paper shows that reducing transaction costs, developing and improving market infrastructure and limiting the influence of intermediaries are critical. Also, having producer organizations rectify scale disadvantages will enable better participation of smallholders in different marketing arrangements
This paper studies the relationship between the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and market orientation of farm production in India. This is the first time that the WEAI has been used in an Indian agricultural context and the first...
Decline farm product prices and the subsequent effect of diminishing farm income become a core factor of sustaining peasant agriculture in developing countries. The small holding agriculture concentrated on paddy and vegetables farming in Sri Lanka also suffered from the...
This chapter analyses the access to and adequacy of formal sources in meeting the credit needs, particularly agricultural credit needs, of small farmers in India with the help of banking data, and data on the borrowing profiles of these households...
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve...
The development community has shown increasing interest in the potential of innovation systems and value chain development approaches for reducing poverty and stimulating greater gender equity in rural areas. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of systematic knowledge on how such...
