Improving Access to Finance: Smallholder farmers often struggle to access credit to purchase inputs, invest in equipment, and market their produce. Providing access to affordable credit, microfinance programs and financial literacy education can help farmers increase their productivity and profitability.
Enhancing Market Linkages: Connecting farmers to market opportunities, including local, regional, and international markets, is key to improving the competitiveness of smallholder agriculture. This can be achieved through the development of farmer cooperatives, partnerships with private sector companies, enabling infrastructure and the use of digital technologies.
Strengthening Extension Services: Providing extension services to smallholder farmers is crucial to improve their knowledge of best practices, new technologies and marketing opportunities. This includes access to agricultural extension services, training programs and community-based organizations.
Encouraging Adoption of Sustainable Agricultural Practices: Sustainable agricultural practices can improve soil health, conserve natural resources, and increase farmers’ resilience to climate change. Encouraging the adoption of these practices through training, incentives, and demonstration projects can improve the competitiveness of rural smallholder agriculture value chains.
Enhancing smallholder agricultural value chains has the potential to generate several co-benefits including food and income security for the smallholders and consumers along the value chain, accelerating socio-economic development and satisfactory employment, unlocking higher premiums for smallholder products in the market and enhancing their market competitiveness, and generating desirable environmental benefits.
Accelerating sustainable value chains in our agri-food systems is vital for reasons highlighted here and many others. Hopefully, an increasing investor and consumer consciousness and demand for accountability in terms of the sustainability in the value chains of our agricultural systems will give a boost to producing and consuming ‘right’.
