African farmers must organize to supply supermarkets or be marginalized - UN

The spread of supermarkets could marginalize small farmers in Africa unless they organized themselves into cooperatives to meet new marketing, credit and technology requirements, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned today.

"If we don't help small farmers tap into the supply game and become players in this new market, they will be left on the sidelines," said Kostas Stamoulis, a senior FAO economic analyst. "It could be catastrophic."

Farmers who risk being left out of the transformed domestic market need to have new resources and improved training, he said. Potential assistance might include organizing effective farmer cooperatives and associations to supply supermarkets; creating credit programs to buy the technologies needed to upgrade output; and disseminating the knowledge needed to take part in complex negotiations.

Propelled by the forces of globalization and urbanization, the rise of supermarkets across the developing world was an inevitable reality, Mr. Stamoulis said.

"A steep increase in the pace of urbanization, combined with globalization and the influx of foreign direct investment, mean that Africa will see far more dramatic changes in its food supply system than we have seen in developed countries," he said.

Thomas Reardon of Michigan State University told an FAO workshop on food systems in developing countries that Kenya alone has some 200 supermarkets and 10 hypermarkets, equivalent in sales to some 90,000 small shops and accounting for up to a third of food retail in the country. "Supermarkets are already buying three times more produce from local farmers than Kenya exports to the rest of the world," he added.

In South Africa, supermarkets already account for more than 55 per cent of national food retail, he said.

"This is an opportunity for the private sector, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international development organizations to work together," Mr. Stamoulis added. "We cannot stop change, but we can shape it."