Publication database

The ongoing compound and acute crises of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine meet longer-term but no-less pressing crises of social and environmental sustainability in and around agriculture, food and nutrition security. Many international mechanisms are already in place on agriculture and food systems which are almost unavoidably not (yet) sufficiently coordinated. A new generation of due diligence laws recently is added mostly by industrialised countries to that existing mix of policies in place addressing serious sustainability gaps of supply chains into these countries. However, these regulations also bear the risk of generating unintended negative consequences, particularly for smallholder farmers in poor countries.

Increasingly, development funding is directed to programmes aiming to make market systems more favourable for smallholders and low-income consumers of food. Assessing whether a programme indeed contributed to development outcomes is challenging. Building on real-world experiences with theory-based evaluation in inclusive business programmes, this IDS Bulletin discusses approaches and methods for meaningful impact evaluation. 

Foreign companies operating in a ‘host’ country’s private sector play an important role in fostering inclusive development in these nations. This PhD thesis, exploring the contributions of the Dutch private sector to inclusive development in Kenya’s three most important sectors, tea, flower and renewable energy, finds that private companies operate in a very specific context and must adapt to existing local circumstances that are often not automatically inclusive.

This edition of The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets focuses on how markets can bring us closer to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. SOCO 2020 offers a detailed analysis of the major global trends in agri-food markets and trade to identify how to reap economic, environmental and social gains and spur overall development. The report also looks at policy responses to address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food value chains, both nationally and globally.

Population growth, rapid urbanisation, and a young population are major trends shaping the future of African agriculture. The sector must take on these issues to safeguard its future ability to produce enough food. Therefore, it is imperative to establish an integrated land management strategy by increasing organic matter, retaining moisture, and increasing the use of inorganic fertilisers. Governments must invest in technical and professional agricultural education. In addition, policies must clearly support family farming and the facilitation of private sector intervention via inclusive business models.

Commendable progress has been made across many parts of Africa over the past years to increase agricultural productivity, reduce hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, create new employment opportunities for young people and improve the livelihoods of rural communities. Yet, demographic change, urbanization, shifting diets and climatic changes mean that pressure is growing on food systems to make more food and more varied and nutritious food available and accessible.  How African countries position themselves to harness and deploy digital technologies will determine the future competitiveness of African agriculture and its contribution to African economies.

The current report — Byte by byte: policy innovation for transforming Africa’s food system with digital technologies— summarizes the key findings of a systematic analysis of what seven African countries at the forefront of progress on digitalization of the agriculture sector have done right. It analyzes which institutional and policy innovations were implemented and which actions by the private sector and agtech start-ups were taken to increase the development and use of digital tools and services in the agriculture value chain. The objective of this report is to identify interventions that work and benefit farmers and other actors in the value chain and recommend options for policy and program innovation that allow countries to develop a digitalization ecosystem in which digital technologies and services can be developed and used to foster growth and competitiveness in Africa’s agriculture value chains. 

Commissioned by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, this report presents an analysis of four smallholder support programmes in South Africa.

To boost agricultural development in developing countries, donors are increasingly resorting to blended finance: the practice of combining public development funds with private resources. Blended finance may open opportunities to inject more resources into the food and agriculture sector, but the assumptions that blended finance is inherently beneficial for agricultural development and that it is an efficient way to finance smallholder agriculture, are not supported by the evidence currently available.

This paper argues that private finance blending should be used with caution in rural development until donors can demonstrate the merits of blending using evidence-based results, in particular the added value of blending for development impact. This is especially important given the obligations of donors to make progress on the reduction of social, economic and gender inequalities. The increasing focus on private finance should not obscure the vital role of public finance in promoting inclusive agricultural transformation that benefits small-scale farmers.

Inclusive businesses (IBs), embodying partnerships between commercial agribusinesses and smallholder farmers/low-income communities, are considered to contribute towards rural development and agricultural sector transformation. Structured as complex organizational setups consisting of, and overcoming the limitations of, standard inclusive instruments, they allow for the inclusion of smallholders and low-income communities into commercial agricultural value chains. This publication explores if the commercial sector, through IB partnerships, contributes towards the government's transformation and developmental objectives