Dynamic land markets Conclusion: meeting small-scale farmers in their markets 62
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Faced with changing markets and opportunities in value chains, farmers have options to ‘step up’ to formal
markets, ‘hang in’ to informal markets, or ‘step out’ into other sectors Dorward et al. 2009. Much analysis of
‘inclusive business’ does not distinguish between these different groups, and sees potential for trading with the
majority of producers at the ‘base of the pyramid’. But inclusive business and value chain interventions work
mainly with the farmers best equipped to step up.
There is some justiication for such an approach. These value chain-ready producers, who may already be
formally organised, represent the low-hanging fruit. They are also likely to be part of agriculture in the next decade
or more, and are ready to invest in upgrading production to meet formal buyers’ needs. In so doing, they provide
employment and other knock-on beneits to the wider rural economy.
But in coming decades, a soft landing for the rural economy may depend on getting beyond the 2-10 per
cent of producers reached by many of the new value chains. Wiggins Green 2012a argues for bringing
an additional 25 per cent of farmers into agricultural development, though not the entire smallholder sector.
He envisions a widespread agrarian transition similar to what seems to be starting in China: ‘the other [two thirds]
of the rural population can then either increasingly earn their livelihoods from the non-farm economy, or move
to towns and cities … [and] gradually lend, rent, or sell their land to their full-time farming neighbours’ Wiggins
2012. Wiggins’s 25 per cent represent another tier of small-scale farmers who could ‘step up’ to full-time
farming — but value chains and inclusive business may not be effective approaches to reach this group.
An alternative state-centred approach is to harness public procurement programmes so that governments purchase
food directly from small farms. ‘Private enterprise cannot reach all the places that the state is able to,’ said Brazil’s
agricultural minister in 2010, when Mercosur adopted Brazil’s public procurement scheme for agriculture
Fraysinnet 2010. Sector-wide organisations and policies, like that seen in the Colombian coffee sector see Section
3.2.3, may also be able to reach a very broad base of producers.
For the poorest small-scale ‘producers’ who are net food consumers, Jaeger 2010, for example, argues that there
are needs ‘far more immediate and these are issues of development, of food security and poverty alleviation,
rather than commerce… The activities of projects and schemes and government interventions that seek to include
the very smallest scale farmers are costly and constraining the very schemes that can bring prosperity to a region.’ In
the Knowledge Programme’s ifth Provocation Seminar,
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Miguel Méndez, the Dutch agency SNV’s representative for Nicaragua, stated that the poorest of the poor cannot
be reached by inclusive business and must be the object of social programmes.
Rights-based approaches explicitly aim to serve the ‘other 90 per cent’. But as recipes for development,
rights-based proposals may still be conceived by experts and implemented from the top down, much like value-
chain initiatives — a pattern noted in the world of urban development by Diana Mitlin in the Provocation Seminars
IIED 2011a. They may start from preconceived ideas of what farmers need and lack, rather than from a direct
understanding of farmers’ own strategies and logic.
Both sides of this debate, then, risk continuing a tradition of paternalistic interventions — government, donor and
private programmes that aim to ‘develop’ small producers without addressing their speciic context and assets,
or their capabilities and aspirations. On both sides, the agency perspective has the potential to identify where
small-scale farmers really are and where they want to be, and can help external interventions adapt accordingly.
smallholders — would quit farming if they had the chance. Satender Arya and Sanjeev Asthana carried out surveys in
two Indian states and found that 77-81 per cent of farmers said they do not want their children to take up farming as an
occupation. In Kenya, 64 per cent of a 900-household survey preferred wage labour cited in Proctor and Lucchesi 2012.
The face of small farms may change if there are fewer farmers in the next generation and many are looking for opportunities
elsewhere. Along with the off-farm jobs discussed below, dynamic land markets may facilitate shifts in who is farming,
and on what land.