We have recently produced three new booklets summarising our work on themes relating to rural development challenges based on our work across our sites. The booklets contain lots of photos and draw from blogs published earlier on this site. They are being distributed in our field sites both to farmers and local officials who have been involved in our work. We thought that blog readers would like to see them too, so below there are links to low-res downloadable versions of all three.
The ‘hidden middle’: rethinking value chains
The first booklet covers our work on value chains across different agricultural commodities – maize, horticulture and poultry. The ‘hidden middle’ refers to the complex web of relations that exist between production and consumption where a whole array of activities takes place, including transport, processing and so on. This is often hidden, and so are the jobs and incomes that are generated directly as a result of agricultural production on the (mostly A1) land reform farms.
This article is from Zimbabweland, a blog written by IDS Research Fellow Ian Scoones. Zimbabweland focuses on issues related to rural livelihoods and land reform in Zimbabwe.
