Making Markets Work for the Rural Poor:
Christian Mission and Global Enterprise

Chris Barrett
Cornell University

Thomas Reardon
Michigan State University

July 5-22, 2005

Funds provided by Fieldstead & Co.

Seminars Description
The Gospels call Christians to serve the poor and to be in the world but not of it. This three week seminar aims to focus the attention of a team of Christian scholars and practitioners on the Christian's call to serve the poor within the real-world context of rapidly changing and globalizing rural markets.

Markets drive resource allocation around the world. But market relations within and between countries are changing rapidly. Globalization is bringing rural areas of the low-income world into more regular and commercial contact with the United States and other high-income countries. The proliferation of supermarkets, fast food restaurants and other modern food retailing firms and concomitant consolidation in the food processing, manufacturing and retailing sectors is changing the face of domestic agricultural marketing systems throughout the world. Meanwhile, advances in information and communications technologies are making it increasingly feasible and cost-effective to base businesses in rural areas.

These processes often attract new actors, rather than improve returns for incumbent actors, including small farmers. In many cases, these changes appear to be leaving the poor behind. In other settings, market expansion and institutional and technological change seems to be providing attractive new opportunities to the poor. There is, however, insufficient understanding of the key determinants of when the poor benefit from emerging markets and when they suffer, and a striking absence of efforts to design public and private approaches to deal with these effects.

This seminar will explore these fundamental questions in detail. Topics for study, reflection, discussion and collaborative research will include the causes and consequences of the downstream shift of economic power in agricultural marketing channels; the role of trust and social networks in facilitating the poor's access to remunerative markets; what policy interventions by governments or donors seem effective in facilitating the poor's access to higher value-added markets; and alternative means of organizing the poor into commercially viable units. We will review general readings as well as materials from a small number of detailed case studies from around the world.

By offering a program permitting intensive interaction in a collegial and relaxed environment, this seminar expects to bring scholars together to advance their own research and to spark new collaborative efforts by seminar participants. The program will consist of daily morning sessions of directed readings, discussion and prayer, and unstructured afternoons for individual reading, reflection and writing and for small group research collaboration. As an end product, the co- directors aim to field at least one panel at a professional society conference (e.g., American Agricultural Economics Association or Western Economics Association International) and for the group to generate peer reviewed publications in edited volumes or scholarly journals.

Past Events