Trends and lessons for future development strategies
The combination of increasingly globalizing agricultural markets, rapidly modernizing local value chains, and urbanizing distribution channels presents African smallholders with considerably more complex challenges than those faced by Asian producers during the Green Revolution era. African smallholders today not only need to produce more efficiently but also need to contend with far more logistically complex and competitive markets. Growing specialization in distribution channels and logistics, rapidly changing and differentiated consumer preferences, and increasingly complex norms, standards, and other technical specifications place increasing demands on the production and management skills of the average smallholder. Due to their large number and geographic dispersion, smallholders are facing significant physical, institutional, and technical constraints in accessing technologies, markets, and services.