Promoting Entrepreneurship in Food Processing Sector for Inclusive Market Oriented Development (IMOD)

Abstract

The need for linking farmers to markets has been identified as one of the most important intervention strategies in the agricultural value chain in order to create impacts in progression towards prosperity. This calls for the creation of an ecosystem that shall catalyse appropriate linkages of the farmers to the markets, ensuring maximum benefit to the poor. The key components required for development of such an ecosystem has been enumerated in International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)’s strategic plan to 2020 and is based on the development pathway called Inclusive Market Oriented Development (IMOD). This is a cycle in which value-adding innovations (technical, policy, institutional and others) enable the poor to capture larger rewards from markets, while managing their risks. There are two major dimensions of IMOD (Figure 1). The curve represents the power of market opportunities that offer prosperity to smallholders. The platform is the risk management dimension, which highlights the need for more effective social assistance programs to help the poorest of the poor, especially the smallholder farmers, connects to market, in a way that builds their own resilience rather than creating dependency