Selecting Value Chains For Sustainable Food Value Chain Development

Value chain development can make significant contributions to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) because it is a powerful approach to address root causes and binding constraints that impede the sustainable development of food value chains. The first step in value chain development is selecting those value chains that, when upgraded, can have the biggest SDG impact. This publication provides practical guidelines on how to select value chains for which upgrading is feasible and impactful in terms of the potential for generating positive economic, social and environmental outcomes. The handbook describes a step-by-step process that helps to assess, compare and select value chains in a participatory and evidence-based manner. It presents a toolbox that can be customized to projects with different budgets, scopes and objectives. This publication forms part of a set of FAO handbooks on Sustainable Food Value Chain (SFVC) development, which together provide hands-on guidance for development practitioners, including international organizations, NGOs, regional bodies and national governments seeking to achieve sustainability objectives through agrifood value chain development projects.

Using sustainable food value chain development (SFVCD) approaches to reduce poverty presents both great opportunities and daunting challenges. SFVCD requires a systems approach to identifying root problems, innovative thinking to find effective solutions and broad-based partnerships to implement programmes that have an impact at scale. In practice, however, a misunderstanding of its fundamental nature can easily result in value-chain projects having limited or non-sustainable impact. Furthermore, development practitioners around the world are learning valuable lessons from both failures and successes, but many of these are not well disseminated. This new set of handbooks aims to address these gaps by providing practical guidance on SFVCD to a target audience of policy-makers, project designers and field practitioners. This first handbook provides a solid conceptual foundation on which to build the subsequent handbooks. It (1) clearly defines the concept of a sustainable food value chain; (2) presents and discusses a development paradigm that integrates the multidimensional concepts of sustainability and value added; (3) presents, discusses and illustrates ten principles that underlie SFVCD; and (4) discusses the potential and limitations of using the value-chain concept in food-systems development. By doing so, the handbook makes a strong case for placing SFVCD at the heart of any strategy aimed at reducing poverty and hunger in the long run.

Sustainable Food Supply Chains: Planning, Design, and Control through Interdisciplinary Methodologies provides integrated and practicable solutions that aid planners and entrepreneurs in the design and optimization of food production-distribution systems and operations and drives change toward sustainable food ecosystems. With synthesized coverage of the academic literature, this book integrates the quantitative models and tools that address each step of food supply chain operations to provide readers with easy access to support-decision quantitative and practicable methods. Broken into three parts, the book begins with an introduction and problem statement. The second part presents quantitative models and tools as an integrated framework for the food supply chain system and operations design. The book concludes with the presentation of case studies and applications focused on specific food chains. Sustainable Food Supply Chains: Planning, Design, and Control through Interdisciplinary Methodologies will be an indispensable resource for food scientists, practitioners and graduate students studying food systems and other related disciplines. Contains quantitative models and tools that address the interconnected areas of the food supply chain Synthesizes academic literature related to sustainable food supply chains Deals with interdisciplinary fields of research (Industrial Systems Engineering, Food Science, Packaging Science, Decision Science, Logistics and Facility Management, Supply Chain Management, Agriculture and Land-use Planning) that dominate food supply chain systems and operations Includes case studies and applications

Agrifood systems in the Near East and North Africa are characterized by increasingly degraded natural resources and vulnerability to climate change, rapid population growth and protracted crises. In addition, the region has been affected by conflict that has further exposed the fragilities and worsened the challenges already faced by communities. Conflict negatively affects the poverty rate, the economic capacity and functioning of agrifood value chains and people’s ability to produce, distribute and access food. In volatile operating environments, resources, government spending and private investment are frequently diverted or reduced, with lasting impact on agri-food value chains and consequently nutrition and food security. Uncertainties inherent to these contexts can further undermine the relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of agri-food value chain development interventions, programmes and projects.Investigating the connection between sustainable, resilient agrifood value chain development and the unique characteristics of the highly volatile situations in which they are operating, these practitioner guidelines propose a four-step approach for selection, analysis and design of agrifood value chains in conflict prone and conflict affected contexts. The approach aims to strengthen the resilience of agri-food value chains through systems-based solutions, adopting a context-sensitive programming approach and ensuring an adaptive programming effort through a Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) framework, to facilitate testing and scaling-up.

These guidelines offer a holistic and structured approach to value chain selection. They combine four different dimensions of value chains/sustainable development: economic, environmental, social and institutional. Since the four dimensions are interconnected, overlooking any one of them during value chain selection will affect the next phase of value chain analysis and development. Because currently no comprehensive or systematic approach or methodology exists that combines these four dimensions, these guidelines have been developed to fill the gap.

This publication constitutes a practical development tool, which implements the sustainable food value chain framework with a focus on small-scale livestock producers, targeting an audience of project design teams and policymakers. Small-scale livestock producers are important actors in food production, human health and management of landscapes and animal genetic resources. However, they face a number of challenges, which hamper their productivity, access to market, and competitiveness vis-à-vis their larger counterparts. By integrating the concepts of value addition and the three dimensions of sustainability, the sustainable food value chain framework not only addresses questions concerning the competitiveness, inclusion and empowerment of small-scale producers, but also incorporates the cross-cutting issues that are increasingly embedded in development projects. These guidelines take the user through the different steps of value chain development, highlighting the particularities of the smallholder livestock sector, such as multi-functionality, specific production cycles or food safety issues, through concrete examples.

Understanding the capacity of food systems to undertake a transformation towards sustainability requires understanding how resources stream in and out of the systems. As complex socio-economic structures, food and agricultural value chains are important means for channeling resources, knowledge, and agency in and out of rural areas. Given their prominent role on the development agendas, there is mixed evidence as to what extent value chains and their actors can contribute to improving the livelihoods in poor rural and urban areas. In order to shape sustainable living places, transformative capacities and good governance are important mainstays. Transformative agri-food value chains are robust and often act as the sole transmission belt for returning capital, resources and identity back into vulnerable areas. Moreover, domestic or regional chains may provide urban consumers with fresh quality food that also contributes to regional identity.

This publication is intended to assist field practitioners, youth organizations and other stakeholders to identify binding constraints and viable opportunities to youth engagement in value chains that can translate into greater youth inclusion. Considering youth heterogeneity and inequalities, the youth sensitive framework for value chain analysis gives guidance to assess factors that push and pull youth into employment and entrepreneurship in value chains. The youth-sensitive value chain (YSVC) analysis is a starting point for youth-inclusive agricultural value chain development, since it identifies entry points and key actions expected to bring about the desired increase in employment and business opportunities for youth within a more attractive agriculture sector.