Clustering For Competitiveness In Agriculture

Clustering for Competitiveness in Agriculture

Building Competitiveness in Africa's Agriculture

Value chain based approaches offer tremendous scope for market-based improvements in production, productivity, rural economy diversification, and household incomes, but are often covered by literature that is too conceptual or heavily focused on analysis. This has created a gap in the information available to planners, practitioners, and value chain participants. Furthermore, few references are available on how these approaches can be applied specifically to developing agriculture in Africa. 'Building Competitiveness in Africa s Agriculture: A Guide to Value Chain Concepts and Applications' describes practical implementation approaches and illustrates them with scores of real African agribusiness case studies. Using these examples, the 'Guide' presents a range of concepts, analytical tools, and methodologies centered on the value chain that can be used to design, implement, and evaluate agricultural and agribusiness development initiatives. It stresses principles of market focus, collaboration, information sharing, and innovation. The 'Guide' begins by examining core concepts and issues related to value chains. A brief literature review then focuses on five topics of particular relevance to African agricultural value chains. These topics address challenges faced by value chain participants and practitioners that resonate through the many cases described in the book. The core of the book presents methodological tools and approaches that blend important value chain concepts with the topics and with sound business principles. The tools and case studies have been selected for their usefulness in supporting market-driven, private-sector initiatives to improve value chains. The 'Guide' offers 13 implementation approaches, presented within the implementation cycle of a value chain program, followed by descriptions of actual cases. Roughly 60 percent of the examples are from Africa, while the rest come from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The 'Guide' offers useful guidance to businesspeople, policy makers, representatives of farmer or trade organizations, and others who are engaged in agro-enterprise and agribusiness development. These readers will learn how to use value chain approaches in ways that can contribute to sound operational decisions, improved market linkage, and better results for enterprise and industry development.

Food Security and Industrial Clustering in Northeast Asia

This book integrates diversified methodologies of area studies, regional economic development, regional science, and related fields to draw up a strategy for forming the “regional food industrial cluster” in Northeast Asia. This is done by assigning “innovation” to a core concept, with the basic problem of food security as the horizontal axis and the areas of Northeast Asia as the vertical axis. Specifically, the principle of “collaborative advantage” as a key factor is extracted from case studies on food industrial clustering in each area. As a final objective, a practical policy recommendation is presented while the theorization of the industrial cluster is developed. Therefore it is also a challenge to the old and new issue of food security which has been argued until now.