Thank you so much. This banana is bought across the street for 36 cents. This banana is bought across the street in the same shop for 66 cents, so how come? Well, this banana is slightly bigger and it is more ripe, but the main reason for why you pay almost double price for this banana is because it is an organic banana. With that in mind, you could ask the question: Is it not a good opportunity for farmers, in particular smallholders, to service the growing organic market? The global organic market is today estimated to be worth something in the range of US$60 billion, and as many small farmers cannot really afford to use a lot of inputs anyway, it seems like a good deal that they could go for the organic market.

With that in mind, I worked between 2002 and 2008 in a development programme in Uganda and Tanzania financed by the Swedish Government. We worked through commercial enterprises and a few cooperatives to organize farmers, all of them smallholders, about 80,000 farmers participated. We worked with a number of crops, but the main focus was on traditional export commodities like coffee, cocoa, cotton, sesame seed, things like that. We did venture into value-addition, and a few high-value crops like herbs and spices, horticulture crops, fresh fruits. What we did was mainly I would say technical assistance, troubleshooting along the whole value chain, all the way from the farmers’ inputs, say seeds, maybe biological pest control, knowledge, up to the market in Europe and United States, troubleshooting when there were complaints, miscommunication between the buyer and the seller, participating in the trade fairs, branding – we did all of that because a value chain is not stronger than its weakest link and to put all efforts on one side of the chain is rather misplace energy…