Boosting farmer incomes in agricultural supply chains

Published on 23 September 2019, this short article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review is based on the Farmer Income Lab's outreach and analysis project, designed to identify programmes with the highest-possible income increases and rapidly assess what they might have to add to the body of knowledge about “what works” to increase farmer incomes. After crowdsourcing and working to validate cases from more than 80 experts and practitioners in this field, the authors identified nine initiatives that increased incomes by at least 100 percent for thousands or even millions of farmers across a range of commodities and geographies. In an initial analysis of these nine cases, they observed three patterns that explain the programme's exceptional success. The patterns expose the importance of putting farmers at the center of business practice, and making fundamental shifts in the way the benefits and risks of supply chains and commodity sectors are distributed. The insights and implications for global food and agriculture companies, and their partners in government and civil society, are significant. The review also confirmed that the most successful cases share the basic good practices of bundling together multiple interventions to tackle the multi-dimensional nature of poverty, and tailoring support and services for farmers based on a deep understanding of their needs and the local context. 

The article features the case of a network of coffee cooperatives called the National Union of Coffee Agribusinesses and Farm Enterprises (NUCAFE), Uganda, which has been empowering smallholders to maintain ownership over the coffee they grow all the way through the value chain, from harvest to roasting.