Presentation by Kiringai Kamau, Value Chain Analyst and Knowl-edge Specialist, VACID Africab Session: Strengthening Grassroots Engagement in ARD Policy Processes on 5 Nov 2013 ICT4Ag, Kigali, Rwanda

1. Kiringai Kamau

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