With roughly three-quarters of the world’s poor living in rural areas, addressing global poverty requires paying attention to rural populations, especially smallholder farmers in developing countries. Millions of smallholders and others among the developing world’s poor, including a large proportion of women, participate as producers, laborers, traders, processors, retailers, or consumers in agricultural value chains. A value chain refers to the set of interlinked agents that produce, transform, and market the products that consumers are prepared to purchase (see Figure 1 for an outline of a stylized value chain). Improving the performance of agricultural value chains has the potential to benefit large numbers of low-income and poor people. Innovation for Inclusive Value-Chain Development: Successes and Challenges assesses how to improve agricultural value chains, particularly value chains that include smallholders.

Governments, nongovernmental organizations, donors, and the private sector have increasingly embraced value-chain development (VCD) for stimulating economic growth and combating rural poverty. Innovation for Inclusive Value-Chain Development: Successes and Challenges helps to fill the current gap in systematic knowledge about how well VCD has performed, related trade-offs or undesired effects, and which combinations of VCD elements are most likely to reduce poverty and deliver on overall development goals. This book uses case studies to examine a range of VCD experiences. Approaching the subject from various angles, it looks at new linkages to markets and the role of farmer organizations and contract farming in raising productivity and access to markets, the minimum assets requirement to participate in VCD, the role of multi-stakeholder platforms in VCD, and how to measure and identify successful VCD interventions. The book also explores the challenges livestock-dependent people face; how urbanization and advancing technologies affect linkages; ways to increase gender inclusion and economic growth; and the different roles various types of platforms play in VCD.

Inequality and innovation are both rising issues on the international development agenda. Their intersection is inclusive innovation; defined as the inclusion within some aspect of innovation of groups who are currently marginalised. This is a topic of increasing interest and activity. Large firms have been working to deliver innovative goods and services for base-of-the-pyramid consumers: the c.3 billion who live on less than US$2 per day. Within poor communities, an influx of new technology, finance and capabilities has spurred more localised innovation. A variety of different models have been identified by which this activity is organised and implemented, such as inclusive innovation clusters, grassroots innovation, frugal innovation, innovation platforms, and inclusive user-producer interactions. This book explores the operation, conceptualisation and impact of these models, and analyses the nature of inclusive innovation practice and research. It will be of interest to researchers, policy-makers, strategists and other practitioners associated with these new forms of innovation. This book was originally published as a special issue of Innovation and Development.

Using sustainable food value chain development (SFVCD) approaches to reduce poverty presents both great opportunities and daunting challenges. SFVCD requires a systems approach to identifying root problems, innovative thinking to find effective solutions and broad-based partnerships to implement programmes that have an impact at scale. In practice, however, a misunderstanding of its fundamental nature can easily result in value-chain projects having limited or non-sustainable impact. Furthermore, development practitioners around the world are learning valuable lessons from both failures and successes, but many of these are not well disseminated. This new set of handbooks aims to address these gaps by providing practical guidance on SFVCD to a target audience of policy-makers, project designers and field practitioners. This first handbook provides a solid conceptual foundation on which to build the subsequent handbooks. It (1) clearly defines the concept of a sustainable food value chain; (2) presents and discusses a development paradigm that integrates the multidimensional concepts of sustainability and value added; (3) presents, discusses and illustrates ten principles that underlie SFVCD; and (4) discusses the potential and limitations of using the value-chain concept in food-systems development. By doing so, the handbook makes a strong case for placing SFVCD at the heart of any strategy aimed at reducing poverty and hunger in the long run.

Lead firms, development organisations, donors and governments view value chains and voluntary standards as vital instruments for achieving millennium development goals through trade and market-related interventions. The precise foundations for these development strategies, which suggest positive development outcomes from integration of poor actors into value chains, are as yet underdeveloped. The interdisciplinary work in this volume shows how trade is managed and asks theory-driven questions about how value chains relate to locally-rooted development processes. Policy makers and development practitioners are increasingly using value chain analysis to frame pro-poor development interventions. This book offers multiple conceptualizations of development outcomes of inclusion of small producers, firms and workers in value chains. Processes of inclusion at different scales are unpacked in order to identify the terms of participation of small producers, firms and workers. As value chains are embedded, the book further argues that inclusion can be conceptualized as the degree of alignment between value chain logics and the institutions and capacities in the local business system. The combination of inclusive governance and endogenous development informs a grounded debate on roles of development-oriented partnerships. Chapters in this volume draw on multiple strands of economics, sociology, political science, geography and management studies; and for empirical grounding engage in comparative analysis of cases from Latin America, SubSaharan Africa and East and South East Asia. These are combined with processes taking place at a global level, such as the proliferation of standards and the growth of roundtables and multi-stakeholder partnerships. The contributions explore contrasts – between contexts, between industries or commodities/products, and between conceptual frameworks; and the context dependency of development impact necessitates cross-case investigations. This collection will be of interest to scholars in development studies, economics, business studies, as well as to development policy makers.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book provides a fresh, updated and science-based perspective on the current status and prospects of the diverse array of topics related to the potato, and was written by distinguished scientists with hands-on global experience in research aspects related to potato. The potato is the third most important global food crop in terms of consumption. Being the only vegetatively propagated species among the world’s main five staple crops creates both issues and opportunities for the potato: on the one hand, this constrains the speed of its geographic expansion and its options for international commercialization and distribution when compared with commodity crops such as maize, wheat or rice. On the other, it provides an effective insulation against speculation and unforeseen spikes in commodity prices, since the potato does not represent a good traded on global markets. These two factors highlight the underappreciated and underrated role of the potato as a dependable nutrition security crop, one that can mitigate turmoil in world food supply and demand and political instability in some developing countries. Increasingly, the global role of the potato has expanded from a profitable crop in developing countries to a crop providing income and nutrition security in developing ones. This book will appeal to academics and students of crop sciences, but also policy makers and other stakeholders involved in the potato and its contribution to humankind’s food security.