Managerial Skills for Developing Agricultural Value Chains

Strategies to develop agriculture prioritize strengthening upstream and downstream enterprises to help smallholder producers integrate into demanding and evolving food markets. The strategies are operationalized through value chain approaches geared to support private agro enterprises and help them link with producers. Helping small and medium agro enterprises (SME), which are often numerous in most countries, to grow offers an opportunity to strengthen private enterprises agriculture, apart from encouraging new ones to emerge. Building their managerial skills—to become formal and exploit growth opportunities—offers the foundation for such strategies, although how to help them grow is still not clear. Equally critical are the capabilities of managers of public programs that intervene to encourage productive alliances between producers and agro enterprises. Selectively intervening to help enterprises, without an adequate understanding of enterprises, they often make both intentional and unintentional errors. Building managerial skills in both private enterprises and public entities is, thus, essential to make effective interventions in agricultural chains.