How to do Strengthening community-based commodity organizations

With populations growing, fast emerging middle classes are demanding quality produce, luxury goods (tobacco, alcohol) and animal proteins, and there is pressure on domestic agricultural production to meet these needs. Smallholder farmers, those producing on less than 5 acres, remain the backbone of agricultural production: smallholder farming is the livelihood of more than 50 per cent of the population in most developing countries. With this rising demand, agribusinesses, both local and multinational, are growing and increasingly seeking to source production from smallholder farmers. While such business relationships have been formally occurring for decades in certain export crop value chains, there is now growing pressure from export market countries for “fair trade” and “sustainably produced” products, which actively engages those at the base of the pyramid.