A burgeoning recent literature emphasizes "livelihood" diversification among smallholder populations (Chambers and Conway 1992, Davies 1993, Ellis 1998, Bryceson 1999, Ellis 2000, Little et al. 2001). While definitions vary within this literature, the concept of livelihoods revolves around the...

With the expanding globalization of trade, grades and standards help to set the ‘rules of the game’ and their implications for developing countries are becoming increasingly relevant. While they are clearly important to trade, their formation and utilization is also undergoing a shift from...

The Indian government has provided large subsidies to stimulate the take-off of the cold storage sector. However, the impact of this policy is not well understood. In a case study of the potato sector in Bihar, we find that there have been dramatic increases and rapid up-scaling of cold...

Introduction. As part of the National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP), a potato value chain study was organized in Bihar, in collaboration between the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in Patna, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the International...

In disadvantaged districts of Bihar, one of the poorest states in India and an area where smallholders dominate, we find that there have been dramatic increases and rapid up-scaling of modern cold storages, triggered by market reform, investment subsidies, and better overall public service...

There have been dramatic increases and rapid up-scaling of modern cold storages in Bihar, one of the poorest states in India and an area where smallholders dominate. These investments have been triggered by market reform, investment subsidies, and better overall public service provision and...

Fresh produce suppliers in Europe and the United States use a mix of price and non-price marketing strategies. This paper shows that these strategies create, using Mancur Olson's terms, two collective goods: overall consumer confidence in the market's ability to deliver credence attributes, and...

The role of G&S has shifted from a technical instrument to reduce transaction costs in homogeneous commodity markets to a strategic instrument of competition in differentiated product markets. The nature of G&S has shifted from performance (realized characteristics of the product) to process...

There has been extremely rapid transformation of the food retail sector in developing regions in the past 5 to 10 years, accompanied by a further consolidation and multi-nationalization of the supermarket sector itself. This organizational change, accompanied by intense competition, has driven...

This paper presents emerging evidence pointing to the transmission to developing countries' rural spaces of the impacts of agrifood market transformation occurring at national and global levels. That transmission takes place via retail chains penetrating intermediate cities and rural towns, and...