Ricerc@Sapienza

Crop commercialization is one of the leading forces behind today's agricultural development. Trade enables farmers to diversify their production through a market-linked approach, bringing significant advantages to small-scale producers, like access to new customers, lower costs, and business risk diversification. Nevertheless, the outcome could be very different in a risky environment, like developing countries. This scenario can be exacerbated (or eased) under the current second unbundling revolution allowing the participation of Global Value Chains (GVCs) also for agriculture products and smallholder farmers. The conceptual framework for GVCs participation and positioning stands on what was outlined by Antràs and Chor in 2013 and 2018. The literature has vastly debated how a value chain is structured, but it has not yet discussed how it gets structured, especially at the farmer level. Given the vacuum in the literature in the ex-ante scenario, this research project aims at studying how smallholder farmers in developing countries position into the market chain first and in GVCs second. The proposed model stands on an input-output table set at the micro-level and a revised Antràs and Chor's measure of upstreamness in the value chain leveraging for farming household's selling location and crop buyer.