Beyond just buying: investing in equitable value chain partnerships with smallholders
Over the past two decades, efforts to integrate forest and farm smallholders into modern value chains have aimed to achieve positive social and environmental impacts. However, business partnerships within these chains are often shaped by underlying power imbalances, failing to address deep disparities in information, resources and capacities.
Because of this, smallholders can sometimes lack genuine representation and voice. Instead, equitable value chain partnerships should invest in smallholder producers and their organisations in ways that go beyond just buying. Companies should provide a bundle of services to smallholders such as finance, inputs, skills, access to markets and more.
Equitable partnerships should also invest in the broader local community, considering the interconnected systems at the landscape scale and the diverse markets that sustain them. This should ensure the long‑term health and resilience of the environments and communities from which companies source their products, ultimately strengthening their business through a sustainable and resilient supply.
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Available at https://www.iied.org/22662iied
