Innovative markets for sustainable agriculture: Exploring how innovations in market institutions encourage sustainable agriculture in developing countries
Résumé
From 2013 to 2014, the FAO and the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique
(INRA) undertook a survey of innovative approaches that enable markets to act as
incentives for the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. Through a competitive
selection process, 15 cases from around the world provide insights into how small-scale
initiatives that use sustainable practices have been driven by market demand to create
innovations in the institutions that govern sustainable practices and market exchanges.
These cases have responded to both local and distant consumers’ concerns about the
qualities of the food that they eat. Through this study we learned that the initiatives rely
upon social values to better adapt sustainable practices to local contexts while creating
new market outlets for their products. Specifically, private sector and civil society actors
are leading partnerships with the public sector to build market infrastructure, integrate
sustainable agriculture into private and public education and extension programmes, and
ensure the exchange of transparent information about market opportunities. The results
are: (i) system innovations that allow new rules for marketing and assuring the sustainable
qualities of products; (ii) new forms of organization that permit actors to play multiple
roles in the system (e.g. farmer and auditor, farmer and researcher, consumer and auditor,
consumer and intermediary); (iii) new forms of market exchanges such as box schemes,
university kiosks, public procurement or systems of seed exchanges; (iv) new technologies
for sustainable agriculture (e.g. effective micro-organisms, bio-pesticides, soil analysis
techniques, personal protective equipment). We have found that the public sector plays a
key role in providing legitimate political and physical spaces for multiple actors to jointly
create and share sustainable agricultural knowledge, practices and products.