Disruptive Innovations in Food Value Chains and Small Farmers in India

Value chain is associated with quality differentiation and value added from the consumer perspective, while supply chain is a supplier perspective with a focus on efficiency and logistics and coordination aspects of moving products from 'farm to fork'. In their influential article in Science, a group of eminent scholars working in this area called for 'research focus on public policies, private-firm decisions, and food value chain innovations that can improve the functioning of domestic food value chains, not just on export channels' (Gomez et al, 2011). Concurrently, the locus of attention has been shifting from just research organisations to farmers to wide array of actors through this transformation.2 The first generation of value chain analyses focused on 'economic upgrading' of firms by interaction with lead firms, while the second generation focused on 'social upgrading' of the workers (small farmers in our case) and their employment and income (Kaplinsky, 2000; Gereffi et al, 2005; Gereffi, 2014). Some of the other reforms include- recent permission allowing 100 per cent foreign direct investment in domestic trading of processed food products, inauguration of the e-national agricultural market in April 2016, and proposed new model Agricultural Produce Market Committees Act 2017 for correcting some of the inadequacies of the APMC Act 2003, apart from the marketing reforms already implemented (Table 1).