Beyond Compliance

Centrally-regulated markets hold traders to a certain standard of care in pricing and quality control. The inherent duality in how they operate is insufficient to monetize new market attributes.

“If we are serious about the audacity of hope called agroecology, we need to break the duality of production and consumption region market dynamics. Beyond farmer markets, beyond organic cooperatives, beyond community-supported agriculture, beyond payments for ecosystem services to regenerative farmers, we need to build alternative market structures from the ground up to scale up regenerative agriculture.”

Well then. Wonder what this might this involve?

The beauty of market economics is that the framework can be transferred across commodities and regions. It is based in behavioral science common to human beings everywhere.

The above quote closes out today’s issue of Agribusiness Matters, which is “read by those who want to discover Systems Thinking in Food and Agriculture in an age of runaway Climate Change”. Author Venky Ramachandran provides thoughtful and thorough commentaries on agtech and market development each week, mainly through the lens of the Indian agriculture marketplace, but with references and applications to farming and food systems worldwide.