What Do the Case Studies Tell Us? Lessons for the Future

The case studies in this book were selected from a large number of possible candidates because they satisfied several quite demanding criteria. They had to include small farmers, or other non-farm participants, who might have been expected to be excluded from a "modern" value chain. The value chains could be initially cross-subsidised from other activities in the initiating firm or financed from external sources, but in the long-term they had to be sustainable and profitable for all parties; "corporate social responsibility" initiatives, which might be dropped when management's attention was drawn to some other more visible or attractive area, were not admitted. The value chains had to be on a fairly large-scale, or to have the potential to be scaled up to include thousands of producers; they could not be based on a minor specialised niche market…