Synthesis of Recommendations
From AGRA/ILRI Conference
“Towards Priority Actions for Market
Development for African Farmers”
Chris Barrett and Ade Freeman
May 15, 2009
Nairobi, Kenya
Priority actions: the policy maker’s perspective
 Address the food price dilemma
 Create synergies between agricultural production and markets
 Provide options that address the challenges of smallholders
 Commercial viability of smallholder agriculture given small
farm sizes and land sub division
 Functioning of land and labour markets
 Identify options for governments in public private partnerships
 Priority actions must
 Meaningfully address these challenges
 Inform choices/policy decisions
Principles To Guide Priority Actions
1) Actively promote a culture of evidence-based decisionmaking by governments, donors, communities, NGOs,
firms … everyone.
2) Improve coordination of interventions and their
evaluation so as to generate more generalizable and
directly comparable evidence on what works, what
doesn’t, why and for whom.
3) Celebrate and encourage private sector initiative but
equally recognize the critical role for government – to
create appropriate enabling environment and crowd-in
private investment via rule-based interventions .
Principles (continued)
4) Essential to promote and involve farmer organizations in
identification, design and evaluation of interventions.
5) Pay careful attention to the essential differences between
gross benefits and net benefits, and to the additionality
and opportunity cost of using public or donor funds.
6) Exports to OECD countries are desirable and beneficial,
but focus on far larger domestic and regional markets.
7) Shape modern value chains (supermarkets, etc.) where
possible, but focus first on traditional channels, which
remain the most important markets for some time.
Toward priority actions:
what we know works
 What we know works based on hard empirical evidence.
 Developing efficient rural input markets
 Fertilizer and key inputs
Agro-dealer networks
Smart subsidies - provide affordable inputs; stimulate growth of
rural enterprise
 Improving efficiency of agricultural value chains
 Market Information Systems
 Private standards and certification
 ICT based MIS for market dev, including use of mobile phones
 Improving integration of smallholders in value chains including
through organizational innovations
 Farmer organization and collective action
 Service delivery hubs
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Priority Actions for market development
 Focus investments to scale up “what works” for greater impacts
 Rigorously evaluate interventions and policy changes: identify what
works/what does not work, why, and in what contexts
 Use lessons to inform strategy formulation and investment
programming
 NEPAD/COMESA policy and advocacy processes
 CAADP Pillars – investment programming and country compacts
 Country strategies and investments
 Donor strategies and investments
 Private for-profit and not-for-profit actors
 Learn, document, and mainstream into policy processes and
investment programming
Priority Actions: Policies
1) Reduce international (tariff and non-tariff) trade
barriers.
2) Harmonize grades and standards within national and
regional markets (for seed, other inputs, outputs).
3) Pay attention to the possible need for anti-trust actions
where non-competitive behaviors exist.
4) Land and labour (education, health) policies must be
right to facilitate smallholder productivity growth and
market participation.
Priority Actions: Investments
1) Improve access to financial services (credit, insurance)
for producers and market intermediaries, especially
small-scale and women.

But How .. Need to know more??? Many candidate
instruments – village banks, warehouse receipts, index
insurance, identity-based credentialing, venture capital for
SMEs, etc. – evaluate best tool for the particular context.
Need experimentation!
2) Extend, upgrade and maintain transport and power
infrastructure to reduce commercial transactions costs
and crowd-in private investment.
3) Build independent African food policy analysis capacity.
Priority Actions: Investments
(continued)
4) Advance technical skills training, in post-harvest value
addition activities, water management, new high-value
products, food safety standards, etc. to better equip
poor farmers and SMEs to increase and stabilize
productivity and incomes.
5) Extend, upgrade and maintain town and urban
marketing wholesaling infrastructure.
6) Facilitate rapid, broad roll-out of advanced ICT to
improve information flow and to help resolve
coordination problems in value chains. Essential to
leveling the playing field.
Key areas of agreement
 Investment in infrastructure is high priority area of action
 Need to re-prioritize infrastructure investments taking into account
 Returns to infrastructure investment and comparative advantage eg
Transport corridors and rural road networks that support trade
around “bread basket” areas
Value chain as useful framework for market development: focus on
institutional arrangements and organizational innovations to improve
efficiency and integrate smallholders
Understanding the appropriate role for government
 Political economy
 Rule based
 How make model/process more efficient
Actor linkages … need to address coordination failures at different levels
Capacity building.
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Thank you for your insights and for
refining this synthesis of a rich discussion