No abstract

No abstract

Supermarkets are rapidly penetrating urban food retail in Kenya and spreading well beyond their initially tiny market niche among the urban middle class into the food markets of lower‐income groups. Having penetrated processed and staple food markets much earlier and faster than fresh foods, they have recently begun to make inroads into the fresh fruits and vegetables category. Supermarkets in Kenya already buy about half the volume of produce exported, and thus represent a significant new ‘dynamic market’ opportunity for farmers. The important changes in their procurement systems bring significant opportunities and challenges for small farmers, and have implications for agricultural diversification and rural development programmes and policies.

tonnes (Mt) (i.e. 20% of the world's rice imports) (USAID, 2009), governments could no longer afford traditional price interventions to protect domestic rice consumers from the volatility of the global rice market. Although the 2008 rice price crisis may in part have been driven by temporary speculation and a weak US dollar, there are underlying structural trends that have caused an increase in the price of rice (and other staple foods) to a higher plateau. The comparative advantage of local rice production has been one of the key issues in the food-policy debate in Africa since the early 1980s (Pearson et al., 1981). However, policies for increasing competitiveness have mainly focused on productivity and prices. The 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc-a failed attempt to reverse the historical urban bias and divert African consumers from imported to local grains-clearly illustrated that price policies do not work well in the context of the African rice sector due to a low price response by rice consumers and producers (Diagana et al., 1999). This suggests that

No abstract