In the last six month, the Federation of Free Farmers (FFF) of the Philippines has pursued its collaboration with National Food Administration (NFA) as a member of the steering committee of the Agricultural Commodity Exchange System (ACES) pilot project. This initiative has emerged from a concerted effort and lobbying from various public and private stakeholders involved in agricultural markets and rural development. The on-going effort and commitment of the various parties involved in establishment of the ACES is remarkable, given the uncertain institutional environment induced by changes in the government administration after the presidential election. Hence, the capacity to resume ESFIM activities after the release of the required funding for the collaborative research is very timely as gives the opportunity to the FFF to strengthen its capacity in defending and supporting its view on this new institutional arrangement. Furthermore, the ESFIM collaborative research contents adjustment and review carried out in October take advantage of the lessons learnt throughout the first steps of the implementation of the ACES.

In November 2010 with the support of Agrinatura researcher the collaborative research proposal have been streamlined and focused. Hence, it aims to document, more substantially than it was initially planned, how the ACES will address directly or indirectly smallholder farmers’ positions and constraints in the Filipino corn market through a baseline survey in key corn producing areas to improve the capacity of farmers’ organizations to assess the impact of the ACES on smallholders’ corn marketing. In order to anticipate farmers’ constraints in benefiting from ACES and to maximize its impact, ESFIM funds will be allocated to the design of training tools in using ACES tailored to the needs and capacity of local farmers organization and cooperatives. The training will also target local corn traders that may improve their position on the corn market by using the ACES, improving in turn the local corn marketing situation faced by smallholders (increasing competition, more effective price incentives for quality improvement). The training component of the ESFIM collaborative project will include the design and testing of the training material on a pilot basis, while, this validated training material will be used after to upscale farmers’ capacity with other sources of fund. The last objective pursued with the ESFIM collaborative funds is to documents the whole process of the ACES establishment from the farmer organization perspective in order to take stock of specific obstacles and issues that should be consider by any other farmer organizations that would be involved in such institutional process. This objective intend to fill a gap that was noted by FFF members during the study tour organized by the NFA in Sub-Saharan Africa to visit various market organization institution in early 2010.