Growing domestic and international markets for high value agricultural products can represent lucrative opportunities for competitive producers. At the same time, prices of staple commodities are steadily declining and these markets are being squeezed, especially for farmers whose production systems are marginally competitive or that have been protected historically from international competition. Among the latter are millions of rural people who traditionally struggle to meet their subsistence needs by growing staples, working off-farm as labourers and selling a small surplus to generate income to meet their basic needs.
The workshop brought together a group of strategic thinkers and knowledgeable practitioners, from different points in the research and development continuum and from different stakeholder groups, to explore the extent to which the poor can benefit from dynamic markets for high value agricultural products (HVAP). Five background papers complemented individual participants¿ knowledge and experience: one on global R&D issues related to the benefit that the poor might gain from HVAP markets and four regional situation papers from Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean and West Asia and North Africa.
The workshop participants arrived at a shared working understanding of HVAP as ¿crop, fish, livestock or non-timber forest products that return a higher gross margin per unit of available resources (land, labour, capital, human capacity) than other products within a given location and context¿. A series of pro-poor characteristics and attributes of HVAP were identified...