While agricultural value chains are rapidly evolving (Reardon, 2015; Reardon et al., 2021; Barrett et al., 2022), research attention has increasingly taken notice of the important role played by actors in the ag ricultural midstream. The agricultural midstream consists of activities that take place after production but before final sale to consumers, with existing literature highlighting transportation, trading/wholesaling, processing/packaging, and storage as key activities (Reardon, 2015; Ambler et al., 2022a). However, even as research on the agricultural midstream has been growing, little is known about the poten tial financial needs or capabilities of midstream actors (Ambler et al., 2022a; Bellemare et al., 2021; Reardon and Minten, 2021). If midstream actors face meaningful financial constraints in growing their businesses, it can hinder employment opportunities, increase consumer food prices, depress agricul tural producer prices, or constrain growth more broadly.

A rapid increase in aquaculture production in Bangladesh has lowered fish prices, increased protein consumption, and reduced poverty. The Making of a Blue Revolution in Bangladesh offers a valuable case study of how this transformation in the fish value chain has occurred and how it has improved the lives of both fish producers and fish consumers and considers the future potential of aquaculture in Bangladesh.

Considerable poverty and food insecurity in Ethiopia, combined with the overwhelming majority of Ethiopians who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, make agricultural transformation a crucial development goal for the country. One promising improvement is to increase production of teff, the calorie- and nutrient-rich but low-yielding staple. The Economics of Teff: Exploring Ethiopia’s Biggest Cash Crop examines key aspects of teff production, marketing, and consumption, with a focus on opportunities for and challenges to further growth. The authors identify ways to realize teff’s potential, including improving productivity and resilience, selecting and scaling up new technologies, establishing distribution systems adapted to different areas’ needs, managing labor demand and postharvest operations, and increasing access to larger and more diverse markets. The book’s analysis and policy conclusions should be useful to policy makers, researchers, and others concerned with Ethiopia’s economic development.

We study post-harvest losses (PHL) in important and rapidly growing rural-urban value chains in Ethiopia. We analyze self-reported PHL from different value chain agents – farmers, wholesale traders, processors, and retailers – based on unique large-scale data sets for two major commercial commodities, the storable staple teff and the perishable liquid milk. PHL in the most prevalent value chain pathways for teff and milk amount to between 2.2 and 3.3 percent and 2.1 and 4.3 percent of total produced quantities, respectively. We complement these findings with primary data from urban food retailers for more than 4,000 commodities. Estimates of PHL from this research overall are found to be significantly lower than is commonly assumed. We further find that the emerging modern retail sector in Ethiopia is characterized by half the level of PHL than are observed in the traditional retail sector. This is likely due to more stringent quality requirements at procurement, sales of more packaged – and therefore better protected – commodities, and better refrigeration, storage, and sales facilities. The further expected expansion of modern retail in these settings should likely lead to a lowering of PHL in food value chains, at least at the retail level.

This book provides a global perspective on the various issues that the industry has to face as well as to provide some key global strategies that can help coping with those global challenges, such as collaboration, strategic value chain planning, and interdependency analyses. It presents literature reviews, strategic research orientations, assessment of some current key issues, and state-of-the-art methodologies.

Austria is set to overcome the COVID-19 shock and its economic scars with the help of genuine sanitary, health and economic support policies. The country faces the opportunities and the challenges of two major structural transformations: transition to a net zero emission economy, and the generalisation of more advanced forms of digitalisation.

The Retail Value Chain analyses the changes in the retail industry such as internationalization and consolidation and looks at the strategic options open to companies. It covers retail structures, efficient consumer response, partnerships in retail value chains, demand management, store operations, IT trends, loyalty programmes, shopper information sharing and more. In addition to providing useful insights into why retail operates the way it does, The Retail Value Chain describes the key concepts of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) and provides several illustrative cases to demonstrate the results. As such, it is essential reading for both retail practitioners and students of retail and channel marketing.