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Empowering Smallholder Farmers in Markets

In many countries, it is not the policy, as such, but the budgetary, technical and/or administrative implementation of the specific policy that falls short and needs to be adjusted to generate positive impact for smallholders. Policy instruments and institutional arrangements have to be designed and built in a technically feasible and effective way for the objective of poverty reduction and food security to be reached. And learning between countries on the pros and cons of these instruments is key in this innovation and policy design process. ESFIM’s overall objective is to generate demand-driven action research supportive to the policy activities undertaken by farmers’ organisations to strengthen the capacities of smallholder farmers in developing countries to generate remunerative cash income from markets by creating an enabling policy and regulatory environment as well as effective economic organisations and institutions.

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ESFIM Newletters report on current highlights in the programme:

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Case-studies on organisational intelligence of economic farmer organisations in Bolivia

During 2011, 38 economic farmr organziaciones have been studied to describe the rules and regulations that they implemented to resolve the tesnion between the nterest of the group and the interest of the individual member when engaged in collective marketing. The studies have emerged in a partnerhsip between ESFIM (www.esfim.org)  and FONDOECAS (www.fondoecas.org). The latter uses the studies as a base-line fo an impact study. ESFIM uses the studies to feed a portal on ‘organisational intelligence’: www.collectivemarketing.org.

The studies are available for download: read more »

Making the Connection: Value chains for Transforming Smallholder Agriculture – Session 12: Farmer Organizations in Value Chain Policy Making

ESFIM presented outcomes of its research -for-advocacy work in the UNECA/CTA International Conference “Making the Connection: value chains for transforming smallholder agriculture. Four National Farmers Organisations (NFOs) presented the process and the outcomes of their advocacy work and the role of evidence and research in it: JNC-Perú, CPM-Madagascar, FUPRO-Benin, and NASFAM-Malawi. Stephen Muchiri form the Eastern Africa Farmers’ Federation (EAFF) chaired the session. read more »

ESFIM on GCARD2 in Punta del Este

ESFIM participated in the Second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (http://www.egfar.org/gcard-2012) in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in a break-out session on 30 October 2012 Briefing_Paper_Session _P3 2_Turning innovation into market opportunity_11-10-12_Final. Three ESFIM partner NFOs presented their experiences: CMC-Costa Rica, CAF-Uruguay and JNC-Perú. Also FFF-the Philippines was present at the conference. The GCARD-conference aims to increase the effective steering of reseach, especially in the international research centres (CGIAR), towards smallholders’ interest.  ESFIM, farmer-led research for advocacy was presented as an innovative model of research funding and demand-led research governance, and a necessary complement to ‘bridge’ the gap between the research community and the farmer organisations. The break-out session can be viewed as a web-cast on You Tube http://tinyurl.com/ccabrba.

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