What's New

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.

As the global population has become increasingly larger and more urbanized, and as incomes continue to rise, agricultural markets have changed drastically. The demand for high-value agricultural products and the emphasis placed on foreign trade means that poor rural farmers are often left out of the market. Smallholder farmers may not be able to compete with larger farmers who can provide consistent quantities of high-quality products.