Using ICT4Ag to Promote Smallholder Wealth Creation
Download as PPTX, PDF1 like369 views
The document discusses the challenges faced by smallholder farmers regarding food prices and their lack of control over the market. It highlights the role of intermediaries in perpetuating unfair practices and the need for better governance and empowerment solutions. It calls for the use of technology to provide farmers with market information and fair pricing to improve their economic situation.
Using ICT4Ag to Promote Smallholder Wealth Creation
- 2. Consumers are concerned that prices of foods consistently increase which makes food affordability a challenge Producers too are concerned that their share of the earnings betrays their productive efforts, particularly when they are aware of the high prices that ‘their customers’ pay for their produce Intermediaries remain the uneasy value chain beneficiary who rarely suffer the value chain woes Consequences that diminished food supplies result in genuinely high food prices
- 3. No organizational infrastructure exists to air their frustration Smallholder farmers are chained in their engagement with agriculture There are no avenues for wealth creation Agriculture is not a business. Its in business where money is made…
- 4. The Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s killed the infrastructure for knowledge provision to farmers SAPs ushered in the era of the market intermediaries becoming the providers of information to producers. Farmers may not know that their challenge is reliance on buyers who ‘own market information’ and linking them to the same market.
- 5. Intermediaries create all manner of ways to swindle unwitting farmers: They cheat on market price information They cheat on the actual deliveries that the farmer delivers to them, and They pretend to abide by standards by using faulty standard devices (weighing scales)
- 6. The playing ground is tilted to favour of intermediaries. There is no chain governance! Farmers keep losing out from skewed weighing and skewed pricing information from the middlemen Payment for farmers’ labor is never addressed Margins from input are never considered The outcome: more poverty to the smallholder producers implying greater need to carry out more research on poverty dynamics, more investment in models that can eliminate poverty, more research on how make poverty history in out times
- 7. How do we create a level playing field? How do we remove the information asymmetry? How do we ensure that farmers get a share of the market price? How can we allow producers of food to be the poorest and least nutritionally nourished? What is the role if ICT4Ag in infusing value chain governance? What institutional vehicles can we use to deliver value chain governance that benefits the producers as it benefits the consumer?
- 8. Research, governments, development actors have solutions that end up as new lessons learned. Time for lessons is over; farmers need knowledge and knowledge-bases which they are in control of A clear understanding of ICTs in their inclusive perspective offers the solution There is need for: Farmer empowering weighing solutions Knowledge based database solutions Farmer payment solutions based on digitally weighed farmer produce