I have recently returned from a trip where I had the opportunity to visit a value chain project in the Philippines. We were brought to an area in Mindanao where SDC Asia was working with various businesses involved in production and distribution within the banana chip/cardava (cardava = Filipino cooking banana similar to plantain) industry to encourage upgrading and implementation of best practices. After interviewing multiple individuals we realized that various people were hesitant to upgrade due to social relationships and influences. For example, SDC Asia has trained the cardava traders on how to sort cardava by size and quality and then buy the cardava at different prices from the farmers based on that quality. The reason being is that traders receive higher prices from Manila clients for larger cardava. However, the traders in this town buy all the cardava for one set price per kilo (including cardava which they cannot even sell) and do not sort them by size. When asked why he preferred this kind of transaction he said he didn’t want to upset the farmer and lose business. Ideally, if he were to initiate this kind of sorting he would make more money and encourage the farmer to start using better farming practices that would yield larger cardava, and the farmer would make more money as well.
It seemed strange to our group that all these individuals had been trained to improve the business practices and yet they weren’t implementing what they had learned. We knew that this behavior had a social context, but no one talked about it and we didn’t know how to extract that information from those being interviewed. To make matters more complicated, this particular region in Mindanao has a history of tribal and religious conflict. Our group of practitioners could only assume that this impacted the social relationships of the business people in the cardava industry—but how?
We know that social relationships can be a useful platform for establishing competitive business relationships; but what happens when the social relationships hinder competitiveness within the value chain and make it less efficient? There are various questions that arose out of this issue:
1. When starting a program to improve business practices, how do you evaluate the social norms and relationships and how they will impact your project?
2. Do social relationships within the value chain always sacrifice competitiveness?
3. How do we leverage the benefits of these relationships and make them more business oriented?
4. When working in a post-conflict area in value chain development, are there special precautions that should be taken when trying to change the relationships between value chain players?
3 Comments
It is really interesting
It is really interesting case you brought in. It has been the real challenge in the ground. Some time one- time event is not enough in such kind of environment. Therefore, we have to integrate the value chain initiatives in to long term community development /social mobilization process particularly with social re integration progarmme. It is required to network with other players so that there will not be direct visibility of real value chain actor. Otherwise there will be a big question of market distortions. Changing behaviors and social norms is very difficult particularly in conflict affected community where there is question of trust among buyers and produces and hardly exist the win- win situation.
It needs lot of patient and long term awareness. While I was working in vegetable production/ market linkage programme in Nepal where community had perceptions that the green vegetable is not good for health the community used to consume only dry vegetable. To over- come this challenges we integrated our programme with health awareness component where by we included the awareness/health education through non formal education programme on importance of green vegetable for human health
social relations
Posted for mmorgan
One almost begins to feel
One almost begins to feel that the further down the value chain, there is more humanity and respect, and it is the higher up that this is lost. Is this ‘bad ‘ business, or is it the way it should be? Is it the answer to real sustainability? Many an african farmer is battling to produce products for export following stringent quality standards. He is paid for the top quality and often dumps the lesser quality. In the long term does better prices for smaller volumes really empower the farmer or does it in fact have the opposite effect?(Asides from being environmentally wasteful)
I feel we are missing the ‘humanity’ in the value chain as we strive for quality.