Improving tree product marketing for smallholders


Selling leaf meal prepared from Leucaena leucocephala, a fodder shrub in Tanga, Tanzania. Photo: S Franzel, World Agroforestry Centre

Agroforestry systems are found in a wide range of settings, ranging from forest-edge communities with poor physical access to markets to peri-urban homegardens providing perishable fruits and vegetables to nearby urban markets. Physical access, policy regulations, economic barriers and bargaining power vary widely among these situations, but in many of them, access to knowledge and skills needed to benefit from market interactions are unevenly distributed among members of the farming community.

Issues of gender and equity are as important at the market access as at the production stage. Across the wide spectrum of agroforestry systems and products (ranging from high price per unit volume non-timber forest products, via smallholder timber to tree crops, fruits and vegetables), our global research project on tree product marketing aims to understand how value chains currently function and where there are possibilities for local actors to improve their livelihoods, either by capturing a larger share of product value or by otherwise increasing net benefits.

Our work aims to assess ways to expand smallholders' access to value chains for agroforestry products and to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of value chains so as to improve smallholder livelihoods. We address problems faced by two sets of actors:

  1. Small-scale farmers and entrepreneurs, who face high marketing risks and costs and earn low returns
  2. Agencies, both private and public, trying to facilitate smallholder marketing.