STAPLE FOOD VALUE CHAINS: A QUIET REVOLUTION TAKING PLACE IN ASIA
Five years have passed since the 2007-2008 food crisis. Food prices still remain high and volatile. Ensuring long-term food security is still a great challenge, especially in Asia, where a third of the world’s poor and malnourished population lives. Efforts to find solutions have been made by governments, international development agencies, researchers and all other stakeholders, however, very few empirical studies have been done in terms of the function and structure of staples supply chains that link producers and consumers in Asia.
The recent book “The Quiet Revolution in Staple Food Value Chains: Enter the Dragon, the Elephant and the Tiger” is aiming to fill this knowledge gap. By interviewing nearly 3,500 farmers, traders, wholesalers, millers and cold storage facility providers, the book provides rigorous evidence on the structural transformation of staple food value chains in Bangladesh, China and India.
The study finds that the value chains in rice and potato – the two major staples in Asia – have shifted from local production and consumption to geographically longer supply chains, meaning the food products are produced and consumed in different parts of the country.
Instead of top-down reform, the structural changes of value chain systems are grassroots in nature, driven by increased demand for off-season crops, and improvements in technology such as modernized mills and cold storage facilities. These structural changes in the value chain have benefited farmers, as they now have access to multiple selling options and are no longer price-takers in the market. Consumers also gain from the value chain revolution: they can buy potatoes in all seasons; choose from different qualities and brands of rice, and can better communicate with a branded seller if anything goes wrong.
The book also shows that the off-farm value addition accounts for 40% of the rice price and 36% of the potatoes price, indicating that the processing, storage and distribution of food should be taken into account when discussing food security in Asia.
To better improve the efficiency and modernization of the value chain, governments play an important role of ensuring an enabling environment for the private sector’s investment through basic infrastructure improvement, extension services, and research and development. Farmers are heterogeneous in terms of farming size and nonland assets, indicating that government needs to develop a comprehensive strategy tailored to different groups.
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