Value Chains

Introduction

The Food Security Portal and the PIM Value Chains Knowledge Portal teams are pleased to announce the awardee for a grant to produce a new e-learning course. Diego Naziri of the International Potato Center (CIP) submitted a proposal for an e-learning course aimed at training facilitators in CIP’s Farmer Business School(FBS) methodology.

While agricultural development has long been linked to increased food production and availability, improved farming productivity, and increased incomes for small farmers, the changing global landscape has resulted in agriculture playing a larger role in many other areas of human well-being, including reducing poverty, providing adequate nutrition, improving environmental sustainability, and promoting equity and equality among genders.

Value chains include all actors and activities from food production to consumption—“from farm to fork”—enabling complex food systems to be molded into a comprehensive, solution-oriented approach to improving nutrition security. While value-chain interventions have historically focused on increasing income for smallholders and other stakeholders along the chain, value chains can also play an important role in determining the availability, affordability, quality, and acceptability of nutritious foods.

Asia is home to more than two-thirds of the world's poor and hungry. And as populations around the world continue to grow, the region's most vulnerable people will be faced with even greater challenges in the coming decades. Climate change and unsustainable resource use are likely to impede agricultural productivity, exacerbating already high and volatile food prices and presenting significant barriers to poor populations' access to affordable food supplies. But the news is not all bad.