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Good Practices
Introducing Organic Farming System in Olive Production and Linking Small Farmers to Markets
2006
The Global Partnership Program (GPP): "Linking Farmers to Markets" is a global initiative aimed to help small farmers successfully link to markets by fostering mutual learning and sharing knowledge which build and adds value to successful experiences, market oriented research, innovations and investment initiatives.
Harnessing the potential of small-holder farmers and entrepreneurs will be achieved by:
- Contributing to achieve an enabling policy and institutional environment conductive to successful linkages of farmers and entrepreneurs to markets.
- Offering appropriate and targeted information tools and methods for catalyzing farmers' and entrepreneurs' linkages to markets.
- Strengthening the capacities of producers, farmer organizations, market chain actors and researchers, to respond to market opportunities.
Linking Farmers to Market (LFM) is a major aim of GPP. The growing number of small farms and declining average size of operational holdings indicate the weakness in their access to critical production resources. Therefore, they are operating at a lower equilibrium. Several studies indicate that small farmers encounter entirely different set of problems in both input and output markets due to their unique characteristics. The input markets include, land, labor, credit, information and technology and purchased inputs.
They also face the consumption market in addition to the output market. To bring them to a high level of equilibrium, we need to understand the constraints in various markets.
Farmers through development pass by four stages:
- Subsistence Stage: Individual small-scale farmers selling surplus into market
- Early stage: small-scale farmers organized to sell the produce collectively
- Developing stage: small-scale farmers organized and adding value, diversifying products
- Mature Stage: small-scale farmers organized and fully integrated into a supply chain
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