Food supply chains are extremely important for food access and livelihoods across Africa, but their role is often overlooked and underappreciated. Under normal conditions, the gap between myth and reality can result in the design of policies and programs with limited or negative impacts on food security and welfare. The shock of COVID‐19 has heightened this disconnect, with potentially dire consequences for food security.

Propelled by urbanization, rising incomes, and changing diets, food markets have been expanding in Africa and South Asia, creating the vast potential for job and income opportunities along food supply chains and, hence, for poverty reduction. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that spread to a pandemic in early 2020 provokes enormous setbacks to this expansion. This, however, should provide lessons regarding the importance of resilient and inclusive food systems.

This study examined consumers’ purchasing habits and demand in peri-urban Mexico City for three types of tortillas: i) machine-made white, ii) handmade white, and iii) handmade blue. As part of a sensory analysis, the participants rated the blue maize tortillas significantly higher across all categories (overall score, flavour, smell, texture in mouth, texture in hand, size, thickness, and colour). To explore how demand varies according to the intended use, we conducted a choice experiment using three scenarios: in-home daily use, in-home special event, and out-of-home consumption.

Rice plays a strategic role in food security in West Africa. However, the region increasingly relies on rice imports due to a growing and structural deficit, and domestic value chains face constraints in technology, finance and coordination. As a result, West Africa is very vulnerable to international and local trade disruptions, such as the ones currently inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

photo credit: World Bank

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, trade-offs have emerged between the need to contain the virus and to avoid disastrous economic and food security crises that hurt the world's poor and hungry most. Although no major food shortages have emerged as yet, agricultural and food markets are facing disruptions because of labor shortages created by restrictions on movements of people and shifts in food demand resulting from closures of restaurants and schools as well as from income losses.

Women's participation and empowerment in value chains are goals of many development organizations, but there has been limited systematic, rigorous research to track these goals between and within value chains (VCs). We adapt the survey-based project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) to measure women's and men's empowerment in the abaca, coconut, seaweed, and swine VCs in the Philippines and to investigate the correlates of empowerment.

The global value chain framework has gained increasing prominence as a policy tool for resource-based industrialization. Focusing on synergies between the commodity-producing and related manufacturing and service sectors, value chain interventions assume that buyer-supplier linkages facilitate the upgrading of local industries. This study investigates these synergistic assumptions in the context of the Ivorian cashew industry.

Developing regions' food system has transformed rapidly in the past several decades. The food system is the dendritic cluster of R&D value chains, and the value chains linking input suppliers to farmers, and farmers upstream to wholesalers and processors midstream, to retailers then consumers downstream. We analyze the transformation in terms of these value chains' structure and conduct, and the effects of changes in those on its performance in terms of impacts on consumers and farmers, as well as the efficiency of and waste in the overall chain.

The decade to 2015 saw rapid growth in trade between Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries. Much of this growth reflected South African exports to its neighbours of diversified manufactured goods to meet growing urban consumption and to supply inputs to mining and infrastructure. While most SADC countries, aside from South Africa, grew quite rapidly over this period, their exports remained oriented to a narrow range of minerals and agricultural commodities destined to go outside the region.

We extend the nominal rate of protection (NRP) methodology to a value chain framework. We develop our methodology for three types of value chains: a new value chain created by policy, a value chain in which a by‐product is created in the processing of a commodity, and a value chain in which processing of a commodity generates new product(s). We consider two cases of value chains: when the commodity is tradable and when it is non‐tradable.

The Indian government has made significant efforts to promote dairy cooperatives to link the milk producers with consumers. Despite this, milk marketing is still dominated by traditional outlets. This paper examines the impact of modern dairy value chains on food security indicators such as net returns from dairying and consumption expenditures.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to identify sources and quantifying distortions to agricultural incentives to produce along the small ruminant value chains in Ethiopia.

Design/methodology/approach

National and district level average nominal rate of protection (NRPs) were computed for a five-year period (2010–2015). The authors developed four scenarios based on combinations of the different data generation processes employed in relation to each of the key variables.

Evidence shows the importance of food systems for sustainable development: they are at the nexus that links food security, nutrition, and human health, the viability of ecosystems, climate change, and social justice. However, agricultural policies tend to focus on food supply, and sometimes, on mechanisms to address negative externalities. We propose an alternative. Our starting point is that agriculture and food systems’ policies should be aligned to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Smallholder producers in sub-Saharan Africa are often unable integrate into markets and access high-value opportunities by effectively participating in global chains for high-value fresh produce. Using data from a survey of large avocado farmers in Kenya, this study examines the determinants and impacts of smallholder-producer participation in avocado export markets on labor inputs, farm yields, sales prices, and incomes, using a switching regression framework to control for selection effects.

This paper examines the services sector in Thailand with a focus on regional and global value chains, highlighting the case of the logistics sector. Overall, the results indicate that in Thailand, services exhibit relatively low labour productivity as compared to other sectors. The logistics sector, however, is well integrated into global value chains with links to prominent multinational firms. The findings also suggest that many opportunities lie ahead for Thai firms to move up regional and global value chains.

This paper examines Japan's participation in global value chains (GVCs). To this end, we use plant-level data for Japan to split output in each industry in Japan's manufacturing sector into output for export or domestic sale and create an extended multi-country input-output table (MIOT). We then compute trade in value added (TiVA) indicators to examine the participation of Japanese manufacturing plants in GVCs. Our estimates suggest that Japan's forward participation in GVCs is lower than suggested by estimates computed from a traditional MIOT.

It is now commonly accepted that poverty alleviation and the development of agricultural value chains in low income countries require farmers to innovate. However numerous constraints to innovation adoption have been identified. In the literature, the market structures on which producers sell their output have received remarkably little attention. In this article, I argue that these can impact a producer's choices with respect to the level of effort invested in changing agricultural practices.

This paper aims to analyse the current position and potential for upgrading of the Philippines in the global value chain of information technology offshoring services. With its rapid growth in the last decade, the Philippines is characterized as strong in voice and is expanding in the non-voice and more complex services sectors.

The seminal work by Antras and Chor in 2013 predicted that, under incomplete-contracting environments, the optimal allocation of residual claim for firms participating in global production depends on the relative position at which the supplier enters the sequential production and on the demand elasticity faced by the final-good producer. Using data of Japanese value-added exports, this study empirically verifies this theoretical prediction through supportive evidence.

Regional value chains (RVCs) are considered as an important step towards greater integration into global value chains (GVCs), but African countries trade very little value added with each other. Based on the UNCTAD-Eora GVC database, this paper estimates a panel model from 2006 to 2012 for 37 African countries and sheds light on the role of trade costs in building RVCs in Africa. First evidence is provided for a significantly negative effect on foreign value added of charged tariffs on capital goods and higher time to trade.

Commercial layer and indigenous chicken farming in Nairobi and associated activities in the egg value chains are a source of livelihood for urban families. A value chain mapping framework was used to describe types of inputs and outputs from chicken farms, challenges faced by producers and their disease control strategies. Commercial layer farms were defined as farms keeping exotic breeds of chicken, whereas indigenous chicken farms kept different cross breeds of indigenous chicken.